Diana on a Chase

In the early 19th century, American artists joined their British counterparts and embarked on the Grand Tour. Washington Allston traveled to Europe upon his graduation from Harvard in 1800, and completed this large and ambitious work while in Rome in 1805. Loosely modeled on an alpine vista that Allston sketched while traveling from France to Italy, "Diana on a Chase" is evocative of the classical landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. At right, the Roman goddess of the hunt and her companions wander through the vast mountainous scene. Publicly exhibited in Rome, "Diana on a Chase" received glowing reviews and impressed Allston’s Romantically-minded contemporaries, including poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The artist’s pride in the work was short-lived, however: in 1839, Allston disavowed authorship of the painting, claiming that an aggressive cleaning had ruined his original conception.