Allston seemed equally at home in drawing powerful figures in action, or delicate dreamy figures in repose. He had the true imaginative power which realizes and understands all natural forms.
We have thus given a few words of description to some of these remarkable pictures. We do not hope to convey any idea of them to those who have not seen them, for a picture is by its very nature incapable of being described in words. That which makes it a picture takes it out of the sphere of words. Neither do we attempt to analyze the genius of this great painter. We can enumerate some of his artistic qualities: his power in color, so creative; the still, reposeful spirit of his creations, reminding one of Beato Angelico; his grandly expressive forms; his powerful color compositions; and above all, that greatest crowning merit, that his works are, almost without exception, vitalized by an imaginative force which makes them living presences. Such effects are not produced by talent, however great, by culture, however perfect, but by a mind which is a law to itself,—in other words, a genius. Such, and nothing less, was Washington Allston.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Lectures on the Works and Genius of Washington Allston. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1852.
DOCTOR JOHNS
I.
In the summer of 1812, when the good people of Connecticut were feeling uncommonly bitter about the declaration of war against England, and were abusing Mr. Madison in the roundest terms, there lived in the town of Canterbury a fiery old gentleman, of nearly sixty years, and a sterling Democrat, who took up the cudgels bravely for the Administration, and stoutly belabored Governor Roger Griswold for his tardy obedience to the President in calling out the militia, and for what he called his absurd pretensions in regard to State sovereignty. He was a man, too, who meant all that he said, and gave the best proof of it by offering his military services,—first to the Governor, and then to the United States General commanding the Department.
Nor was he wholly unfitted: he was erect, stanch, well knit together, and had served with immense credit in the local militia, in which he wore the title of Major. It does not appear that his offer was immediately accepted; but the following season he was invested with the command of a company, and was ordered back and forth to various threatened points along the seaboard. His home affairs, meantime, were left in charge of his son, a quiet young man of four-and-twenty, who for three years had been stumbling with a very reluctant spirit through the law-books in the Major's office, and who shared neither his father's ardor of temperament nor his political opinions. Eliza, a daughter of twenty summers, acted as mistress of the house, and stood in place of mother to a black-eyed little girl of thirteen,—the Major's daughter by a second wife, who had died only a few years before.