Washington Allston ARA (November 5, 1779 – July 9, 1843) was an American painter and poet, born in Waccamaw Parish, South Carolina.

His mother Rachel Moore had married Captain William Allston in 1775, though her husband died in 1781, shortly after the Battle of Cowpens.

[3] Named in honor of the leading American general of the Revolution,[4] Washington Allston graduated from Harvard College in 1800 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, for a short time before sailing to England in May 1801.

[5] From 1803 to 1808, he visited the great museums of Paris and then, for several years, those of Italy, where he met Washington Irving in Rome[6] and Coleridge, his lifelong friend.

[10] Allston also exhibited five paintings at the National Academy of Design, but this number is low given his place in the artistic community of the time.

Allston was sometimes called the "American Titian" because his style resembled the great Venetian Renaissance artists in their display of dramatic color contrasts.

[14] His artistic genius was much admired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ralph Waldo Emerson was strongly influenced by his paintings and poems, but so were both Margaret Fuller and Sophia Peabody, wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

[14] The influential critic and editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold dedicated his famous anthology The Poets and Poetry of America to Allston in 1842.