Washington Allston

Allston, Washington

(1779–1843) painter; born in Georgetown County, N.C. He spent many years in England (1801–18), studied with Benjamin West (1801–03), became friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Washington Irving, and produced romantic paintings, such as The Rising of a Thunderstorm at Sea (1804). He returned to Boston (1818), settled in Cambridgeport, Mass., and continued to paint poetic and narrative subjects, as in The Flight of Florimell (1819) and The Moonlit Landscape (1819). His most famous pupil was Samuel F. B. Morse.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.