The “Intellectual and Moral Made Visible”: The 1839 Washington Allston Exhibition and Unitarian Taste in Boston

Abstract

“I have Just come from the Gallery—my third visit,” announced a correspondent to the Boston Daily Advertiser on the second day of the Washington Allston retrospective at Harding's Gallery (Figures 1 and 2), “where I stood in the very midst… of the glowing colors and glorious subjects [of] the artist who stands alone in this his age, in this his art.” He was part of a chorus of dazzled spectators who crowded the exhibition, “filled with enthusiastic admiration” in “surveying forty-five pictures, many of which only the golden time of art could equal.” For the young Henry T. Tuckerman, who would recall it vividly in his influential Book of the Artists, the show “proved an epoch in the history of Art in the United States.” It was also the signal event of the artist's old age: a benefit exhibition that recalled the fifty-nine-year-old Allston from “a life of great seclusion” in suburban Cambridgeport, was extended from six to eleven weeks by popular demand, and fascinated some of the most critical minds in Boston.

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