ALLSTON, Washington, an eminent American historical painter and poet, was born 5th November 1779, at Waccamaw, in South Carolina, where his father was a planter. He early displayed a taste for the art to which he afterwards devoted himself. He graduated at Harvard in 1800, and for a short time pursued his artistic studies at Charleston with Malbone and Charles Fraser. He then removed to London, and entered the Royal Academy as a student of Benjamin West, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. In 1804 he repaired to Paris, and from that city, after a few months’ residence, to Rome, where he spent the greater part of the next four years studying Italian art and Italian scenery. During this period he became intimate with Coleridge and Thorwaldsen. From 1809 to 1811 he resided in his native country, and from this latter date to 1817 he painted in England. After visiting Paris for a second time, he returned to the United States, and practised his profession at Boston (1818-30), and afterwards at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he died on the 9th July 1843. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1819. The paintings of Allsten are characterised rather by grandeur of conception than by skilful execution. In colour and the management of light and shade he closely imitated the Venetian school, and he has hence been styled “the American Titian.” Many of his pictures have biblical subjects, and Allsten himself had a profoundly religious nature. His first great painting, “The Dead Man Revived,” executed shortly after his second visit to England, gained a prize of 200 guineas from the British Institution; in England he also prepared his “St Peter Liberated by the Angel,” “Uriel in the Sun,” “Jacob’s Dream,” and “Elijah in the Wilderness.” ...