WASHINGTON ALLSTON (1779--1843) was a native of South Carolina, but was sent to New England at an early age, and graduated from Harvard College in 1800. The year following he went to England, to study under West, and thence to Italy, where he stayed four years, until his return to Boston in 1809. After a second absence in Europe of seven years' duration, he finally settled in Cambridge, near Boston. Allston's art covered a wide range, including Scripture history, portraiture, ideal heads, _genre_, landscape, and marine. It is difficult to understand to-day the enthusiasm which his works aroused, if not among the great public, at least within a limited circle of admiring friends. He was lauded for his poetic imagination, and called "the American Titian," on account of his colour; and this reputation has lasted down to our own time. The Allston Exhibition, however, which was held two years ago at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has somewhat modified the opinions of calm observers. Allston was neither deep nor very original in his conceptions, nor was he a great colourist. One of his most pleasing pictures, _The Two Sisters_, is full of reminiscences of Titian, and it is well known that he painted it while engaged in the study of that master. In the case of an artist upon whose merits opinions are so widely divided, it may be well to cite the words of an acknowledged admirer, in speaking of what has been claimed to be his greatest work, the _Jeremiah and the Scribe_, in the Gallery of Yale College. Mrs. E. D. Cheney, in describing the impression made upon her by this picture after a lapse of forty years, says:--"I was forced to confess that either I had lost my sensibility to its expression, or I had overrated its value.... The figure of the Prophet is large and imposing, but I cannot find in it the spiritual grandeur and commanding nobility of Michel Angelo. He is conscious of his own presence, rather than lost in the revelation which is given through him. But the Scribe is a very beautiful figure, simple in action and expression, and entirely absorbed in his humble but important work. It reminds me of the young brother in Domenichino's _Martyrdom of St. Jerome_." The same lack of psychological power, here hinted at, is still more apparent in the artist's attempts to express the more violent manifestations of the soul. In _The Dead Man revived by touching Elisha's Bones_--for which he received a premium of 200 guineas from the British Institution, and which is now in the Pennsylvania Academy--the faces of the terrified spectators are so distorted as to have become caricatures. This is true, in a still higher degree, of the heads of the priests in the great unfinished _Belshazzar's Feast_, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The unnatural expression of these heads is generally explained by the condition in which the picture was left; but the black-and-white sketches, which may be examined in the same museum, show precisely the same character.