The Feast of Belshazzar

Abstract

at Rome, lingering in an aesthetic trance. After mentioning a hundred petty preoccupations on which he asked advice, the writer added: One of these subjects (and the most important) is the large picture I talked of soon beginning; the Prophet Daniel interpreting the handwriting on the wall before Belshazzar. It seemed that the painter had made a highly finished sketch of this subject, and desired Irving's criticism Irving, with whom he had wandered on many lovely evening strolls through the ancient gardens and among the Roman hills; Irving, who had wished to abandon America and give up the study of the law, in order to stay on at Rome and take up that of painting for his sake. I think the composition the best I ever made, his correspondent continued. Don't you think it a fine subject? I know not any that so happily unites the magnificent and the awful. ... The picture will be twelve feet high by seventeen feet long. Should I succeed in it to my wishes, I know not what may be its fate; but I leave the future to Had the writer of this ardent missive Mr. Washington Allston, sprung from genial South Carolina, but schooled in New England known what would be the odd fate of his masterpiece (to say nothing of himself), he might not have been so ingenuously ready to leave everything to Providence. For good or for evil, Bel, as he later nicknamed his colossal conception of the last supper of a Babylonian king, was to dominate his whole existence. It was destined to swell into