Portrait of a Member of the Page Family, possibly Martha Page (b. 1693)

Dateca. 1740

Attributed to Charles Bridges (1670 - 1747)

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 26 1/2 x 22 1/4in. (67.31 x 56.51 cm) and Framed: 32 5/8 x 28 5/8 in.

Credit LineGift of Mildred Nelson Page

Object number1942-42

DescriptionA half-length portrait of a youngish, brown-eyed woman, her body nearly facing left but her head 3/4 turned toward the viewer. Her proper right hand is raised, her fingers touching the point of her attire where her wrap comes together over her chest. She has long dark brown hair pulled back from her face but hanging loosely down her back; one long curl rests on her proper left shoulder. She wears a loose dark pink gown or wrap over a white chemise, with a blue drape visible over her proper right arm and hanging down behind her on a diagonal. The background is a warm brown.

Label TextBy tradition in the donor's family, the sitters in this and a companion portrait were long identified as Martha and Alice Page (b. 1695), daughters of Col. Matthew Page (1659-1703) and his wife, Mary Mann Page (1672-1707), of Rosewell plantation in Gloucester County, Virginia. Seeming substantiation for these identifications derived from the fact that portraits of these women were mentioned in the 1709 will of John Page (d. 1710), whom Mary Mann Page had married after her first husband's death.
John Page bequeathed to his son-in-law, i.e., his stepson, Mann Page, "five pictures in double lacker'd frames now hanging in the parlor of my said dwelling house in Gloucester County (vizt) of his father Cole [i.e., Colonel] Mathew Page, of his mother Mrs. Mary Page, of himself and of his two sisters Alice and Martha."
Yet the sitters in Colonial Williamsburg's two portraits appear older than the sixteen and fourteen that Martha and Alice would have been in 1709, and their attire is appropriate to a somewhat later date. Conceivably the will referenced two other (now unlocated) portraits.
Since the 1970s, the two paintings have been stylistically attributed to Charles Bridges, who is not known to have reached America before 1735. Disregarding the will, might Colonial Williamsburg's two portraits, in fact, represent Martha and Alice? The two sitters look rather young to be aged 42-52 (Martha) and 40-50 (Alice), as these women would have been during the decade Bridges worked in Virginia, but lacking further clues, the identifications have been retained as tentative ones.

ProvenanceCWF's donor, Miss Mildred Nelson Page (b. 1865), inherited this painting (and acc. no. 1942-43) from her uncle, Dr. Richard Channing Moore Page, New York, NY, who had acquired them from the family of Thomas Jefferson Page (b. 1807/1808) of Shelly plantation in Gloucester County, Va.