Cambridge Studies in American Visual Culture

1 total work

Washington Allston, Secret Societies, and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting

by David Bjelajac

Published 13 March 1997

Known as the American Titian because of his mastery of colour, Washington Allston was one of the pre-eminent American painters of the early nineteenth century. Attuned as he was to the occult mysteries of Freemasonry and vitalistic theories of chemical optics, contemporaries interpreted the painter's transformation of pigments into light as an alchemical process that resulted in spiritual gold. Through his paintings, Allston sought to facilitate the westward progress of the arts and letters to millennial fulfilment in America. Confronting anti-theatrical, anti-Masonic criticism, Allston's alchemical paintings of angels and angelic beings also represent chemical theories of colour and optics.