Page, William

1811 – He was born on the 3rd day of January this year in Albany, New York.

1828 – He studied at Phillips Academy, Andover in this year, but he did not attend the Andover Theological Seminary on the same campus, as is commonly asserted.

1836 – He 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.

1843 - He was also a friend of William Wetmore Story and of James Russell Lowell, who dedicated his first collection of poems to him in this year.

1849 – Living in Rome from this year until 1860 he befriended Robert and Elizabeth Browning, whose portraits he painted.

1860 - He also wrote A New Geometrical Method of Measuring the Human Figure.

1873 - In this year, he 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

1885 - He died on the 1st day of October this year in Tottenville, Staten Island. Although extravagantly praised as an artist from the 1930s into the 1860s, Page's reputation suffered in later life because he changed his style so frequently and, more particularly, because technical characteristics of his painting method soon caused much of his work to darken excessively.