For his first solo exhibition in 1963, Kitaj divided his work into ‘pictures with commentary’ and ‘pictures without commentary’. Washington Allston in Rome was one of those exhibited ‘without commentary’. It depicts in three-quarter view a figure seated in an armchair. A cloud-like formation threatens to engulf them. The figure, armchair and cloud are shorn of localised detail. Evoked by a uniform surface of black paint, these things are identifiable by their silhouette alone. Ground and sky are referred to using a prismatic contrast of blue and yellow respectively. In much of his work Kitaj wrestled the primordial challenge of how to make an image, and this painting’s extreme simplification of pictorial terms into discrete units of colour and shape shows him performing an acrobatic feat of representation.

Washington Allston (1779–1843) was an American painter and poet. Whilst in Rome in 1805 he formed lasting friendships with two other writers, another American expatriate Washington Irving and the celebrated Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

"Could their conversations, as from day to day they wandered in and about Rome, be recalled and written, we should unquestionably have a record of great interest, rich in poetry, in philosophy, and historic truth."

Kitaj was presumably alive to the affinities he shared with Allston, who was like him an expatriate American painter finding his way in Europe. Kitaj was also a connoisseur of lesser-known American painters, and Allston’s relative obscurity was perhaps another reason to adopt him as the subject for this painting.

Along with Welcome Every Dread Delight, whose title refers to a poem by Edward Young, Washington Allston in Rome demonstrates Kitaj’s concern in the early sixties with literary and artistic Romanticism of the long eighteenth century. (He later credited Romanticism as having ‘its true flowering’ in ‘the modernist art I love best’.) Rome may have seemed to him a peculiarly Romantic prospect at the time since he knew the city only from writings and reproductions – he did not visit until 1981.