Washington Allston, an American painter, born at Waccamaw, S. C, Nov. 5, 1779, died in Cambridge, Mass., July 9, 1843. From considerations of health he was removed in his early boyhood to Newport, P. I., and completed his education at Harvard college, where he graduated in 1800. Having developed a decided inclination for painting, he went in 1801 to London and became a student of the royal academy, then under the presidency of his countryman Benjamin West, to whom he was indebted for many useful hints in the prosecution of his art. A three years' course of study in London was succeeded by a lengthened sojourn in Rome, where he familiarized himself with the works of the old masters, and gained a reputation as a colorist. During a brief visit to America in 1809 he married a sister of Dr. William Ellery Channing, and returning soon after to London entered upon his career as an artist. Within the next few years he produced a number of works of great merit, founded for the most part on subjects taken from sacred history. Two of these, "The Dead Man Revived by touching the Bones of Elijah," and "Uriel in the Sun," displaying high imaginative power and a rare mastery of color and chiaroscuro, obtained for the artist valuable prizes from the British institution, and all of them found ready purchasers.

He returned to America in feeble health in 1818, and during the remainder of his life resided principally in Boston and Cambridge. His subsequent career was without the incentive to exertion which he had experienced in England. His countrymen respected him for the reputation he had acquired abroad, but were scarcely able to appreciate his talents. Removed from the congenial atmosphere of the great art capitals of the old world, he worked listlessly and irregularly, and produced no finished performance of importance comparable in merit with his earlier pictures. During the last 25 years of his life he occupied himself from time to time on a composition of great size representing " Belshazzar's Feast," which he intended should be his masterpiece. But frequent attacks of illness, an over-fastidiousness of taste, and an ideal which became more exalted and exacting as he advanced in years, seriously marred the progress of the work, and it remained at the close of his life an unfinished but splendid specimen of his genius. It is now the property of the Boston Athenaeum. All-ston's works are not numerous, considering the extent of his career, but bear the imprint of an original and artistic mind. The best are founded on Scriptural subjects.

He also painted landscapes and sea pieces of great excellence, and in ideal portraits combined an almost unrivalled purity of flesh tints with depth and power of expression. Had he possessed the moral courage and the physical ability to embody on the canvas his own conceptions, he would have proved one of the most prolific and imaginative artists of the age. No American painter has yet approached him in the delineation of sacred history. Allston was a man of fine literary tastes, and conversed with ease and eloquence on art and metaphysics. He published a volume of poems and a novel, "Monaldi," illustrating Italian life.