Word: allston
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Boston of the 1820s had no doubts that Washington Allston was a great painter-the greatest that the U.S. had yet produced. His English friend Samuel Coleridge wrote: "To you alone of all contemporary Artists does it seem to have been given, to know what Nature is-not the dead shapes, the outward Letter-but the Life of Nature itself." His friends and admirers were transatlantic giants of the day: Wordsworth, Southey, Bryant, Longfellow, Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes...
Then the blazing colors of impressionism came in, and the taste for his dimly lit, Italianate landscapes went out. Not since 1881 had Washington Allston's work been given a full showing. Two years ago, Edgar P. Richardson, director of Detroit's Institute of Arts, decided that Allston's works were "the first important landscapes of mood painted by an American artist." Richardson rounded up 66 paintings and drawings, put them on exhibition. Last week, after two months in Detroit, the Allston show opened in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts...
...massive canvases which Allston prized most, and which his own age most admired-such ambitious subjects as The Angel Releasing St. Peter from Prison-seemed merely pretentious. Modern critics were impressed by the classic cleanliness of his drawings. They liked the grace and casual strength of his nudes (see cut), which Allston had sketched simply as studies for larger pictures. And they warmed to the easy, affectionate handling of portraits like that of William Ellery Channing and aging Benjamin West...
Warner Bement Berthoff, Worthington. Ohio; Warren Bruce Cheston, Rochestor, N. Y.; Stuart Hamilton Cleveland, Hallowell, Mc.; Robert Paul Davis, Dorchester; Christopher Dean, Boston; Marc George Dreyfus, Brooklyn; Robinson Oscar Everett, Durham, N. C.; Edward Alvin Ward Franklin, New York City; Victor Mainard Kimel. Allston; Richard Gordon Kleindienst, Winslow, Ariz.; Richard Reinhold Niebuhr, Hamden, Conn.; Philip Maurice Stern, New Orleans; John Wermer, New York City...
...common touch. He was born John Florence Sullivan, 52 years ago, on the lace-curtain-Irish fringe of Cambridge, Mass. His father was a bookbinder. His mother died when he was three, and he and his brother Bobby went to live with her sister,"Aunt Lizzie" Herlihy, in Allston, Mass. He was a scrawny kid, all arms, legs and adenoids. The tough little Micks in his new neighborhood took one look at his pinched, birdlike face, nicknamed him "Twit," and let him play alone. To pass time - and attract attention - Johnny started juggling whatever came to hand. "That," says Fred...