Washington Allston, secret societies, and the alchemy of Anglo-American painting

by David Bjelajac

Known as the American Titian because of his mastery of color, Washington Allston was one of the preeminent American painters of the early nineteenth century. Attuned to the occult mysteries of Freemasonry and vitalistic theories of chemical optics, contemporaries interpreted the painter's transmutation of pigments into light as an alchemical process that resulted in spiritual gold. Allston himself worked within a Masonic culture of middle-class moral striving and aristocratic self-refinement, ever striving to attain a spiritual alchemy of the self that transcended base materialism. Through his paintings, he sought to facilitate the westward progress of the arts and letters to millennial fulfillment in America. Confronting antitheatrical, Antimasonic criticism, Allston's alchemical paintings of angels and angelic beings also represent chemical theories of color and optics that analogously signify the triunity of God's universe and political economy.