BETSY BROUN: The literary subject of this painting, “Hermia and Helena” by Washington Allston, is taken from Shakespeare. The celebration of intimate friendship derives from the German poet Goethe. The glazing techniques were inspired by Titian. Clearly, Washington Allston was among America’s most educated early painters. He was conversant with Europe's great traditions of literature, philosophy, and art.
Hermia and Helena were two childhood friends from Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Their friendship was so close that they shared all the same tastes and predilections. They even loved the same man. In Act III of the play, Helena describes their similarities and says, “So we grew together, like to a double cherry, seeming parted, but yet a union in partition. Two lovely berries molded on one stem.” When Allston wrote of this subject to a friend in 1831, he said it represented the singleness and unity of friendship.
Singleness and unity combined in his treatment of the two friends. They each have a charming head, but between them they have only two hands holding a single book and two sandaled feet. As a compromise, they show three breasts and knees with the fourth ones mostly hidden. Showing one body frontally and the other in profile recalls the way cubist painters would represent a single figure from multiple views. Psychologist Carl Jung pointed out that such partially conflated figures are common in many cultures from prehistory to modern times.
Washington Allston was educated at Harvard and went twice to England to study. “Hermia and Helena” was painted just before he returned from the second trip in 1818. A revival of Shakespeare’s plays was then underway in England. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was lecturing widely on them. He considered them the most perfect expression of human sentiment. In England, Allston was friends with Coleridge and also with William Wordsworth. Like these romantic poets, Allston celebrated dreams and ideas as well as nature. Shakespeare’s enchanted wood is the second focus of Allston’s painting. The dense foliage and glowing, distant light suggest that Allston knew the work of German romantic painters who had translated the nature poetry of Goethe and Rilke into lush, evocative images.
For all these borrowings of literary and philosophical concepts, however, Allston remained persuaded that the painter’s art was one of magic formulas. He experimented to find the secret of Titian’s subtle glazes, seeking the kind of translucent depth in his pigments that the old Venetian masters had achieved. The foreground areas of “Hermia and Helena,” especially show these deep, rich colors. Unfortunately, after returning to America in 1818, his experiments often led to later deterioration of the paint film. Many of Allston’s paintings have darkened dramatically.
Allston is widely regarded as one of the great seekers in American art, with the highest aspirations for the new nation’s culture. In Washington D.C. in the 19th century, when architects of William Corcoran’s art gallery chiseled the names of the great masters into the cornice of his new building, they chose to inscribe Phidias, Giotto, Dürer, Michelangelo, Raphael, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Reynolds, Ingres, and Allston. It’s pretty good company for an artist from the New World.
