Sara Wells Page (1855-1943)

Sara Wells Page (1855-1943). Page was a British female artist, portrait and figurative painter of the Victorian and Edwardian period. During her lifetime she widely exhibited at Parisian salons and British galleries, including at the Royal Academy of Arts. Three of her paintings are in Wolverhampton Art Gallery. She was born in 1855 in Staffordshire, the fourth of nine children to a successful timber merchant, Samuel Page and mother Sara Wells Page, whose father Thomas Wells (1804–1876) was a wealthy local Ironmaster.Sam Wells Page, Sara's brother, was official receiver for Wolverhampton and Walsall and a solicitor in the Midlands. Both parents died in the 1870s, leaving to their children a considerable fortune, which helped them to live independently. Between 1884 and 1891 she studied drawing at Wolverhampton School of Art and In 1892, after coming back from Italy, she exhibited at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. Sara Wells Page arrived in Paris in about 1892 and studied with William Bouguereau and Tony Fleury. She exhibited at the 1893 Society des Artists Francais. She exhibited at the Société des Artistes Français, Paris Salon and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which from 1892 through 1896 included portraits of members of her extended family. In the following years she continued to paint female portraits, such as: Beatrice (1899), Theodora (1903), among other works, A Capri Maiden exhibited in Birmingham in 1894, and The Breton Peasant was shown in 1893–1894. In 1897 she settled in a wealthy residential suburb of Paris with a strong artistic atmosphere and maintained her own studio there. She took additional lessons from the well-established artists and leading exponents of the academic. Her greatest success was exhibiting the large-scale oil painting Andromeda at the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts in 1902. In 1904 she lived in Paris at 16 Avenue Niel and was identified as a miniature painter. She exhibited at the Royal Academy, Walker Art Gallery, and Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. In 1926 she donated to Wolverhampton Art Gallery her 1902 painting Andromeda, in appreciation for the drawing instruction she received at the Wolverhampton School of Art.