dreams in the ordinary world

Into the otherworld. A vision of the isolation of the human spirit in a region beyond time and beyond space…

The first half of the nineteenth-century in America produced some of the most poetically evocative paintings of the century anywhere. As in the case of Washington Allston’s work they are more often than not likely to be somewhat permeated with flecks of awkwardness or call it naivete when compared with European models, that gives them a special “New World” quality of their own that can be quite engaging disarmed as it is from academic pretension.

---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.---click image for source...

—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.—click image for source…

In Allston’s Flight of Florimell there is an inspiration drawn from Venetian painting. The foliage of the trees, the gleaming fabric, and the escape into a distant landscapeĀ  of warm serenity are Venetian, but the special enchantment is drawn from elsewhere. It lacks the openness of Venetian paintings, and instead we are in the realm of seclusion and mysterious isolation with the windowlike opening through which we may look but not pass. The horse seems magically transfixed as is the rider and her fluttering scarf, an in-between world thatĀ  could be taken as peculiarly American.

The Flight of Florimell was intended to illustrate an episode from Spenser, but it is a stand-alone in terms magical suggestion so that it remains detached from its ostensible subject matter.

(see link at end): Washington Allston was sometimes called the “American Titian” since his style resembled the Venetian Renaissance artists in display of dramatic color contrasts. His work shaped the future of U.S. landscape painting. Also, many of his paintings were drawn from literature, especially Biblical stories.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was strongly influenced by his paintings and poems, but so were both Sophia Peabody-who married Nathaniel Hawthorne-and Margaret Fuller, who described his smile of genius. She wrote about him in the first number of The Dial after she and Emerson attended the Allston Exhibition. Emerson, in spite of his reservations, spoke of Allston in relation to Homer and Shakespeare. Oliver Wendell Holmes cited Washington Allston as the brightest and noblest of all American artists. Read More:http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/allston.php

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