Sara Wells Page Art

Sara Wells 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 was a wealthy local Ironmaster. Sara's brother, Sam Wells Page, was an official receiver for Wolverhampton and Walsall and a solicitor in the Midlands. Both her parents died in the 1870s, leaving to their children a considerable fortune, which helped them to live independently. From 1884–91, Sara Wells Page 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 Société des Artistes Français in 1893, Paris Salon and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which from 1892–96 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 1893–94. In 1897, she settled in a wealthy residential suburb of Paris with a strong artistic atmosphere and maintained her 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 Société 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.