Washington Allston

Washington Allston was born in 1779 on a rice plantation in South Carolina, three years into the American Revolution, and he grew up to be the first American painter to chase the grand European ideal of history and mood. In Rome around 1805 he fell in with the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the two spent long days walking and talking. Allston later said that friendship shaped how he thought about art more than any teacher had.

He is remembered less for any single finished picture than for atmosphere, dim and glowing landscapes and dreamlike biblical scenes that helped open the way for American Romantic painting before Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School landscape painters. Back home he was famous and courted, and admirers called him the 'American Titian' after the great Venetian colourist.

One project shadowed the rest of his life. Belshazzar's Feast, a huge canvas of the biblical king reading mysterious writing on the wall, was begun in London and dragged on for more than two decades. Patrons had advanced money for it, and Allston kept scraping the figures out and starting over, unable to finish. He was found dead beside the easel in 1843, the king's figure still unresolved, and the vast unfinished canvas was later shown to the public exactly as he had left it.