Italian Landscape
Artist: Washington Allston (American, 1779-1843)
Date: 1814
Dimensions:
Frame: 51 × 79 5/8 × 3 3/4 in. (129.5 × 202.2 × 9.5 cm)
Canvas: 44 × 72 in. (111.8 × 182.9 cm)
Medium: oil on canvas
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott
Object number: 1949.113
Label Text:As a young artist in 1801, Washington Allston studied at London’s Royal Academy under American painter Benjamin West (see a painting by West nearby). He then lived for a time in Rome before returning to Boston in 1808. Allston painted Italian Landscape in England during a second stay in Europe (1811–18) as a remembrance and reverie of his time in Rome. He created an ideal, rather than real, image of the Italian countryside set in an imaginary distant past, with classically garbed peasants contemplating a rustic fountain. The ruins of temples and towers create a romantic, picturesque mood, while hinting at the ultimate futility of human endeavor.
Allston’s sensibilities aligned with the Romantics (including his friends the English poets Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth), who gave preference to emotion, faith, and spirituality over rational intellect. They also idealized the freedom of Nature in contrast to the constraints of culture.
Allston’s sensibilities aligned with the Romantics (including his friends the English poets Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth), who gave preference to emotion, faith, and spirituality over rational intellect. They also idealized the freedom of Nature in contrast to the constraints of culture.
On view
In Collection(s)