He graduated from Harvard College in 1800, and for the next three years went to London, England to study art in the Royal Academy, of which Benjamin West was then the president.
Samuel F. B. Morse was one of Allston's art pupils. Morse even accompanied Allston to Europe in 1811.
He then studied in Rome, and finally settled in London, where he won fame and prizes for his pictures.
In 1818 he returned to the United States and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he died at age sixty-four.
His work "Belshazzar's Feast" hangs in the Boston Athenaeum.