- For other people with the same name, see William Page
(disambiguation).
William Page (b. 3 January 1811 in Albany, New York - d. 1 October 1885
in Tottenville, Staten Island) was an American painter and portrait artist.
Life and work
William Page studied at Phillips Academy, Andover in 1828-29 (not the Andover Theological Seminary on the same campus, as is
commonly asserted). A man of murcurial temperament, Page was lacking in religious belief in youth, but later became a
Swedenborgian. He received his training in art from Samuel F. B. Morse (a Phillips Academy graduate) at the National Academy of Design, and in 1836 he became a National
Academician. In the 1830s and 40s Page was based in New York, achieving renown there as a portraitist.
Living in Rome from 1849 to 1860 he
befriended Robert and Elizabeth
Browning, whose portraits he painted. He was also a friend of William Wetmore
Story and of James Russell Lowell, who dedicated his first collection of
poems to him in 1843.
In 1873, Page became president of the National Academy of Design. His work includes a painting
of Admiral David Farragut at the Battle of Mobile
Bay, the Holy Family (now at the Boston Athenaeum) and The Young
Merchants (now at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in
Philadelphia), as well as countless portraits, including portraits of John
Quincy Adams, James Russell Lowell and William Shakespeare, based on the Becker
death mask. He also wrote A New Geometrical Method of Measuring the Human Figure (1860
).
He died in 1885, aged 74 on Staten Island. Although extravagantly praised as an artist
from the 1830s into the 1860s, Page's reputation suffered in later life because he changed his style so frequently and, more
particularly, because techical characteristics of his painting method soon caused much of his work to darken excessively.
References
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