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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XV.--FEBRUARY, 1865.--NO. LXXXVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.




OUR FIRST GREAT PAINTER, AND HIS WORKS.


On the 8th of July, 1843, Washington Allston died. Twenty-one years have
since gone by; and already his name has a fine flavor of the past added
to its own proper aroma.

In twenty-one years Art has made large advances, but not in the
direction of imagination. In that rare and precious quality the works of
Allston remain preeminent as before.

It is now so long ago as 1827 that the first exhibition of pictures at
the Boston Athenaeum took place; and then and there did Allston first
become known to his American public. Returned from Europe after a long
absence, he had for some years been living a retired, even a recluse
life, was personally known to a few friends, and by name only to the
public. The exhibition of some of his pictures on this occasion made
known his genius to his fellow-citizens; and who, having once felt the
strange charm of that genius, but recalls with joyful interest the happy
hour when he was first brought under its influence? I well remember,
even at this distance in time, the mystic, charmed presence that hung
about the "Jeremiah dictating his Prophecy to Baruch the Scribe,"
"Beatrice," "The Flight of Florimel," "The Triumphal Song of Miriam on
the Destruction of Pharaoh and his Host in the Red Sea," and "The
Valentine." I was then young, and had yet to learn that the quality that
so attracted me in these pictures is, indeed, the rarest virtue in any
work of Art,--that, although pictures without imagination are without
savor, yet that the larger number of those that are painted are
destitute of that grace,--and that, when, in later years, I should visit
the principal galleries of Europe, and see the masterpieces of each
master, I still should return to the memory of Allston's works as to
something most precious and unique in Art. I have also, since that time,
come to believe, that, while every sensitive beholder must feel the
charm of Allston's style, its intellectual ripeness can be fully
appreciated only by the aid of a foreign culture.

Passing through Europe with this impression of Allston's genius, in the
Venetians I first recognized his kindred; in Venice I found the school
in which he had studied, and in which Nature had fitted him to study:
for his eye for color was like his management of it,--Venetian. His
treatment of heads has a round, ripe, sweet fulness which reminds one
of the heads in the "Paradiso" of Tintoretto,--that work which deserves
a place in the foremost rank of the world's masterpieces. The great
praise implied in this comparison is justly due to Allston. The texture
and handling of his work are inimitable. Without any appearance of
labor, all crudeness is absorbed; the outlines of objects are not so
much softened as emptied of their color and substance, so that the light
appears to pass them. The finishing is so judicious that the spectator
believes he could see more on approaching nearer. The eye searches the
shade, and sees and defines the objects at first concealed by it. The
eye is not satiated, but by the most artful means excited to greater
appetite. The coloring is not so much harmonious as harmony itself, out
of which melodies of color play through the picture in a way that is
found in no other master but Paul Veronese. As Allston himself expressed
it, he liked to echo his colors; and as an echo is best heard where all
else is silence, so the pure repose of these compositions gives
extraordinary value to such delicate repetitions of color. The effect
is, one might say, more musical than pictorial. This peculiar and
musical effect is most noticeable in the landscapes. They are like odes,
anthems, and symphonies. They run up the scale, beginning with the
low-toned "Moonlight," through the great twilight piece called "After
Sunset," the "Forest Scene," where it seems always afternoon, the gray
"Mountain Landscape," a world composed of stern materials, the cool
"Sunrise on the Mediterranean," up to the broad, pure, Elysian daylight
of the "Italian Landscape," with atmosphere full of music, color, and
perfume, cooled and shaded by the breezy pines, open far away to the
sea, and the sky peopled with opalescent clouds, trooping wide on their
celestial errands.

Of this last landscape the poetic merit is as great as the artistic
excellence is unrivalled. Whoever has made pictures and handled colors
knows well that a subject pitched on a high key of light is vastly more
difficult to manage than one of which the highest light is not above the
middle tint. To keep on that high key which belongs to broad daylight,
and yet preserve harmony, repose, and atmosphere, is in the highest
degree difficult; but here it is successfully done, and again reminds us
of the Paul Veronese treatment. Though a quiet picture, it is full of
brilliancy. It represents a broad and partly shaded expanse, full, also,
of light and sweet sunshine, through which the eye travels till it rests
on the distant mountain, rising majestically in grand volcanic forms
from the horizon plains. The sky is filled with cloudy veils, floating,
prismatic; some quiet water, crossed by a bridge which rests on round
arches, is in the middle distance; and a few trees near the foreground
form the group from which rises the stone-pine, which is the principal
feature in the picture, and gives it its character. As I write this, I
fear that any reader who has not seen the picture to which I refer will
immediately think of Turner's Italian landscapes, so familiar to all the
world through engravings, where a stone-pine is lifted against the sky
as a mass of dark to contrast with the mass of light necessarily in the
same region of the picture. But such effects, however legitimate and
powerful in the hands of Turner, were not in Allston's manner; they
would ruin and break the still harmony which was the law of his mind and
of his compositions. Under this tree, on the path, fall flickering spots
of sunshine, in which sit or stand two or three figures. The scarlet and
white of their dresses, catching the sunshine, make the few high notes
that cause the whole piece to throb like music.

There is also a large Swiss landscape, possessing in an extraordinary
degree the pure, keen atmosphere, as well as the grand mountain forms,
of the Alpine spaces. To look on this piece exhilarates as does the
sight of the Alps themselves; and it strikes the eye as a shrill
trumpet sound the ear. This landscape, a grand antithesis to the last
described, marks a great range of power in the mind that produced them
both.

But Allston was not a landscape-painter. His landscapes are few in
number, though great in excellence. They are poetic in the truest sense;
they are laden with thought and life, and are of "imagination all
compact." They transport the beholder to a fairer world, where, through
and behind the lovely superficies of things, he sees the hidden ideal of
each member,--of rock, sea, sky, earth, and forest,--and feels by a
clear magnetism that he is in presence of the very truth of things.

We now come to a class of Allston's pictures which are known chiefly,
perhaps only, in Boston. They are justly prized by their owners as
possessions of inestimable value; they are the works that more than
others display his peculiar genius. I allude to certain ideal heads and
figures called by these names: "Beatrice," "Rosalie," "The Bride," "The
Spanish Girl," "The Evening Hymn," "The Tuscan Girl," "Miriam," "The
Valentine," "Lorenzo and Jessica," "The Flight of Florimel," "The Roman
Lady," and others; and I shall give a short description of the most
important of these, sometimes in my own words, and sometimes in those of
one who is the only writer I can find who has said anything distinctive
about the works of Allston. I refer to William Ware, who died in the act
of preparing a course of lectures on the Genius of Allston,--a task for
which he was well qualified by his artistic organization, his long study
of Art, and his clear appreciation of Allston's power.

In these smaller ideal pieces Allston seems to have found his own
genius, so peculiar are they, so different from the works of all other
masters, and so divine in their expressive repose. I say divine in their
repose with full intention; for this is a repose, not idle and
voluptuous, not poetic and dreamy, but a repose full of life, a repose
which commands and controls the beholder, and stirs within him that
idealism that lies deep hidden in every mind. These pieces consist of
heads and figures, mostly single, distinct as individuals, and each a
heaven of beauty in itself.

The method of this artist was to suppress all the coarser beauties which
make up the substance of common pictures. He was the least _ad
captandum_ of workers. He avoided bright eyes, curls, and contours,
glancing lights, strong contrasts, and colors too crude for harmony. He
reduced his beauty to her elements, so that an inner beauty might play
through her features. Like the Catholic discipline which pales the face
of the novice with vigils, seclusion, and fasting, and thus makes room
and clears the way for the movements of the spirit, so in these figures
every vulgar grace is suppressed. No classic contours, no languishing
attitudes, no asking for admiration,--but a severe and chaste restraint,
a modest sweetness, a slumbering intellectual atmosphere, a graceful
self-possession, eyes so sincere and pure that heaven's light shines
through them, and, beyond all, a hovering spiritual life that makes each
form a presence.

Perhaps the two most remarkable and original of the pieces I have named
above are the "Beatrice" and the "Rosalie." Of the "Beatrice" there has
been much discussion whether she could have been intended to represent
the Beatrice of Dante. To me it appears that there is nothing like that
world- and heaven-renowned lady in this our Beatrice. She sits alone:
one sees that in the expression of her eyes. Her dress is of almost
conventual simplicity; the colors rich, but sober; the style flowing and
mediaeval. She has soft brown hair; soft, velvet-soft, brown eyes;
features not salient, but rounded into the contours of the head; her
whole expression receptive, yet radiant with sentiment. The complexion
of a tender rose, equally diffused, gives an indescribable air of
healthful delicacy to the face. The expression of the whole figure is
that of one in a very dream of sentiment. Her twilight eyes see without
effort into the very soul of things, as other eyes look at their
surfaces. The sentiment of this figure is so powerful that by its gentle
charm it fastens the beholder, who gazes and cannot withdraw his eyes,
wondering what is the spell that can so hold him to that face, which is
hardly beautiful, surely without surface beauty. I once heard a person
who was unaccustomed to the use of critical terms say of these creations
of Allston, "Here is beauty, but not the beauty that glares on you"; and
this phrase, so odd, but so original, well describes the beauty of this
Beatrice, who, though now transfigured by sentiment and capable of being
a home-goddess, does not seem intended to shine in starry circles.

But for the beauty of execution in this picture, it is unsurpassed. It
is in this respect like the most beautiful things ever painted by
Raphael,--like the Madonna del Cardellino, whose face has light within,
"_luce di dentro_," as is the expressive Italian phrase,--and is also
like another picture that I have seen, attributed to Raphael, in the
collection of the late Baron Kestner at Rome.

Visiting the extremely curious and valuable gallery of this gentleman,
the Hanoverian Minister at Rome, after making us begin at the beginning,
among the very early masters, he led us on with courteous determination
through his specimens of all the schools, and made us observe the
characteristics of each school and each master, till at last we rested
in the last room, where hung a single picture covered with a silken
curtain. This at last, with sacred and reverent ceremony, was drawn
aside, and revealed a portrait by Raphael,--the portrait of a lady,
young and beautiful, and glowing with a tender sentiment which recalled
to my remembrance these heads by Allston, not alone in the sentiment,
but in the masterly beauty of the painting. M. Kestner told us he
supposed the picture to be a portrait of that niece of Cardinal Bibbiena
to whom Raphael was betrothed. The picture had come into his possession
by one of those wonderful chances which have preserved so many valuable
works from destruction. At a sale of pictures at Bologna, he told us he
noticed a very ordinary head, badly enough painted, but with very
beautiful hands,--hands which betrayed the work of a master; and he
conjectured this to be some valuable picture, hastily covered with
coarse work to deceive the emissaries of a conqueror when they came to
select and carry off the most valuable pictures from the galleries of
the conquered city. He gave his agent orders to purchase it, and when in
his possession a little careful work removed the upper colors and
discovered one of the most beautiful heads ever painted even by Raphael.
Though it may and will seem extravagant, I am satisfied that there are
several heads by Allston that would lose nothing by comparison with this
admirable work. Indeed, though M. Kestner's picture is a portrait, it is
a work so entirely in the same class with the "Beatrice," the "Rosalie,"
the "Valentine," and some other works of Allston, in sentiment and
execution, that the comparison is fairly challenged.

"Rosalie" is different from "Beatrice." She seems listening to music;
and so the little poem written by the author, and recited by him when
showing the picture newly finished to his friends, describes her. The
face indicates, not a dream of sentiment, like that of "Beatrice," but
rather a rapture. She is "caught on a higher strain." She is a creature
as passionate as tender; more like Juliet than like Miranda; fit to be
the love of a poet, and to reward his song with the overflowing cup of
love. In this figure also beauty melts into feeling. The composition of
color is masterly; in the draperies it is inlaid in opposing fields, by
which means the key of the whole is raised, and the rising rapture of
expression powerfully seconded. Did I not fear to insist too much on
what may be only a private fancy, I should say that these colors
reverberate like some rich orchestral strain of music.

"The Roman Lady reading." This Roman lady might be the mother of the
Gracchi, so stately and of so grand a style is she. But she is a modern,
for she reads from a book. She might be Vittoria Colonna, the loved of
Michel Angelo, so grave, so dignified is her aspect. The whole figure is
reading. A vital intelligence seems to pass from the eyes to the book.
Nothing tender in this woman, who, if a Roman, takes life after the
"high Roman fashion." The beauty and perfect representation of the hands
should be noticed here, as well as in the "Rosalie" and "Beatrice."

"Triumphal Song of Miriam on the Destruction of Pharaoh and his Hosts in
the Red Sea." This is a three-quarter length figure. She stands singing,
with one hand holding the timbrel, the other thrown aloft, the whole
form up-borne by the swelling triumphal song. I hardly know what it is
in this picture which takes one back so far into the world's early days.
The figure is neither antique nor modern; the face is not entirely of
the Hebrew type, but the tossing exultation seems so truly to carry off
the wild thrill of joy when a people is released from bondage, that it
is almost unnecessary to put the words into her mouth,--"Sing ye to the
Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath He
thrown into the sea." This figure is dramatically imaginative. In
looking at it, one feels called on to sing triumphal songs with Miriam,
and not to stand idly looking. The magnetism of the artist at the moment
of conception powerfully seizes on the beholder.

"The Valentine" is described by William Ware[A] as follows.

"For the 'Valentine' I may say, though to some it may seem an
extravagance, I have never been able to invent the terms that would
sufficiently express my admiration of that picture,--I mean, of its
color; though as a whole it is admirable for its composition, for the
fewness of the objects admitted, for the simplicity and naturalness of
the arrangement. But the charm is in the color of the flesh, of the
head, of the two hands. The subject is a young woman reading a letter,
holding the open letter with both the hands. The art can go no further,
nor as I believe has it ever gone any further. Some pigments or
artifices were unfortunately used, which have caused the surface to
crack, and which require the picture now to be looked at at a further
remove than the work on