Theories of Art. American artists began to move away from traditional artistic standards and explore Romantic thought, which emphasized the intense expression of tumultuous emotion and suggested that individual and national feeling would shape an artist's work. Painter Washington Allston's career reflected the shifting theoretical currents that shaped American art in the early nineteenth century. After a period of travel and study in Europe from 1801 to 1804 Allston returned to the United States and struggled in his painting to reconcile the two major schools of artistic thought. On the one hand was the traditional standard of painting represented by the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds, an English artist who stated that a painting should faithfully reproduce nature as it was seen by the artist and should also carry a clear moral message. For traditionalists such as Reynolds depictions of historical or biblical...