Abstract
The paper examines the dual attitudes reflected in the artistic work of Washington Allston. Born in 1779 and died in 1843, Allston is a famous American painter and poet whose artworks are greatly shaped by European philosophical concepts and artistic traditions. Allston's inheritance of such traditions could be mainly reflected by the deliberate representation of the concept of sublimity and divinity in his artistic creation. This could be readily seen from Allston’s artistic techniques, by which he better instills his aesthetics into his religious paintings while arousing greater empathy among the audience. However, against the background of American Romanticism, Allston was faced with the conflict between conforming to the European aesthetic standards in terms of “general air” and tradition, and the dramatic departure of objects from their “proper place”. As a result, Allston resorted to the institutional liberation, thus forming his distinct artistic style with an evident feature of dual attitudes.
Highlights
The mid-eighteenth century is a burgeoning age for the fledgling world of art in America
Impacted by the idea of represented space, Washington Allston is dedicated to the elucidation of the two ways of expression of Divinity adopted by the pamphlets, which is an important manifestation of how he complied with the European philosophical concepts and artistic traditions in his artistic creation
Washington Allston appears as a middle ground figure in the very timeframe in the American art history during the transition from subject to European ideals to the establishment of selfconsciousness during the American Romanticism
Summary
The mid-eighteenth century is a burgeoning age for the fledgling world of art in America. Combined with Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauty [4], Washington Allston’s Lectures on Art and Poems as well as his Fragments on Religion are used to illustrate the artist’s authentic minds on European standards of beauty and his understanding of it from the evangelical perspective [7] Another primary source used is Joshua Reynolds’s “A Discourse Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy on the Distribution of the Prizes,” which vividly displays the European artistic ideals that greatly shape American art world [3]. The techniques and style of the drawings are analyzed to display the corresponding mainstream ideas in the history they represent
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