The Beatrice by Washington Allston exhibited at the Harding Gallery in Boston in 1839 was completed in 1819. In 1816 in London, however, John Quincy Adams saw a different version of the subject or this picture in an earlier state and recorded in his diary that the “ideal Portrait of Dante’s Beatrix is a beautiful face” (entry for 24 Sept. 1816). Although the artist in giving it the title he did, provided it with the literary association he sought in most of his paintings, the facial features seem clearly those of his first wife, Ann Channing, sister of William Ellery Channing. He recorded her face in a number of drawings before her death in 1815 and carried her image in his memory thereafter.

The other paintings in the 1839 exhibition grouped by Charles Francis Adams with Beatrice and said by him to represent with it a deterioration or a “frittering of his power into miserable unmeaning pictures” with a deplorable lack of “significance,” however excellent their “manual execution,” are Lorenzo and Jessica, 1832, Young Troubadour, 1833, and Rosalie, 1835 (entry for 9 May 1839). Rosalie, like Beatrice, is a single half-length female figure described by later historians as “listening to music at evening time ‘that dreamy hour of the day.’” Again, Young Troubadour is “a dreamy figure playing his guitar beside a fountain and singing to his fair Isabel.” In Lorenzo and Jessica, derived from act 5 of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, “a young woman and her male companion recline in a reverie in a moonlit landscape.” Rather than the “degeneration” in manner that Adams finds in Beatrice and the companion pictures, all of them are judged to reflect an elegaic or poetic mood that marks them “as precursors of late nineteenth-century expressive figure paintings and more particularly of the images of reverie that populate late nineteenth-century American iconography.” These, and most particularly Beatrice, were of the kind singled out by the romantically inclined reviewers of the exhibition such as Margaret Fuller, as among Allston’s greatest works. Adams’ view, however, is echoed by a later critic of note, James Jackson Jarves, who is quoted as finding Beatrice “weak and pale, a sentimental nothing.”

The 1839 exhibition, arranged by Allston’s nephew, the painter George Flagg, included much more than examples of Allston’s recent work. It was, in fact, a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of 47 of his works drawn from his entire career. It was also “of significance ... as a milestone in the history of American art exhibitions, displaying as it did the full range of the work of an eminent living artist” (William H. Gerdts and Theodore E. xiStebbins Jr., “A Man of Genius,” The Art of Washington Allston, Boston, 1979, p. 13, 130, 131, 134, 135, 139, 141, 142, 229; the works referred to above are illustrated at p. 117, 198, 199, 227).