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1871.  THE PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY.  619
painting room in the well-known Studio Building in Tenth Street, New York, where he occupies the large hall in the center, which was originally designed for a public exhibition-room.
Entering his studio, which is opposite the main door of the building, you find yourself in a large and lofty apartment about forty feet square. The floor is bare of carpet or other furniture, with the exception of a few benches; but on the walls, which are lighted from the ceiling, hang some of his largest and most famous pictures. Opposite you, his full-length portrait of Farragut, in the shrouds of his ship, entering Mobile Bay, hangs in a gilt frame, elaborately ornamented with anchors, ropes, and other naval emblems. This picture has recently been purchased by a committee, and presented to the Russian Grand-duke Alexis, who is himself a sailor.
On the same side of the studio is one of Page's golden-haired "Venuses," while his great painting of "Moses, Aaron, and Hur on Mount Horeb," hangs in another part of the room. There are also his copies of Titian's "Belladonna" and "Flora," and of Raphael's "Madonna del Seggiola," while his own portrait and that of his wife occupy positions on different sides of the walls. 
Criticising these pictures, Paul Akers, the sculptor, after the most emphatic eulogy of Page's portraits and Venetian reproductions, adds: "The 'Venus' of Page we cannot accept-not because it may be unbeautiful, for that might be but a shortcoming-not because of any technical failure, for, with the exception of weakness in the character of waves, nothing can be finer-not because it lacks elevated sentiment, for this 'Venus' was not the celestial-but because it has nothing to do with the present, neither is it of the past, nor related in any wise to any imaginable future." On the other hand, the "Moses" fills the sculptor's imagination, and elicits his earnest admiration. "We feel," he declares, "that, viewed even in its mere external, it is as simple and majestic as the Hebrew language. The far sky, with its pallid moon; the deep, shadowy valley, with its ghostly warriors; the group on the near mountain, with its superb youth, its venerable age, and its manhood, too strong and vital for the destructive years; in the presence of such a creation, there is time for a great silence." 
Over the entrance door a broad and deep gallery extends nearly a third of the way into the room, and this is Page's working-studio, which is reached by a narrow, enclosed staircase, where the artist can be free from interruptions of the numerous visitors who frequent his main exhibition room.
If you call out "Mr. Page!" from the lower floor of the studio, a heavy curtain which hangs before the gallery is pushed aside, and a tall, gray-bearded man appears, the light falling on his aquiline features and flat eyebrows.
"Oh, how do you do? Come up!" exclaims a mellow and hearty voice, and the visitor, if an intimate friend, a sitter, or a fellow-artist in the building, turns the door-handle, and ascends the narrow steps to the gallery-room above. Page's up-stairs studio is a real workroom; canvases of all sizes stand with their faces to the wall. There are two or three tables covered with paints, palettes, bits of plaster, two or three books, a volume of Swedenborg, a volume or two of Lowell, and of Shakespeare, of both of whom Page is an enthusiastic and profound student; small casts of the Theseus and Ulysses, of the Egyptian standard, or Apollo, by all three of which statues Page delights to test his original and ingenious method of measuring the proportions of the human figure. At one side, but now with a cloth covering it, hangs a work on which he has long been greatly engaged, a plaster head of Shakespeare, made up from photographs taken from a mask discovered in Germany, supposed to be taken from the face of the poet after his death. You may see the cast or not, as it suits Page's views at the time. If he is willing to show it to you, he removes the cloth, and you behold one of the most impressive pieces of modern sculpture - a colossal face, which we will not attempt to describe, but will only say that it is almost awful from the expression of sweetness and serenity which rests upon the noble features, recalling Mrs. Browning's lines in the "Vision of Poets:" 
"Healthful their faces were; and yet 
The power of life was in them set
Never forgot, nor to forget."

"All still as stone, and yet intense; 
As if by spirit's vehemence 
That stone were carved, and not by [[sense]]."

"All still and calm as statue-stone 
The life lay coiled unforgone
Up in the awful eyes alone,

"And flung its length out through the air
Into wherever eyes should dare 
To front them--awful shapes and fair!"

It is a grand face, which has triumphed over the expression of confusion and unrest which the impress of modern ideas inevitably leaves. He may show you the photographs from which he is making the face, if you have not previously seen them; but, at any rate, if you have been allowed to see the face at all, he will resume his work on it. The light from the ceiling falls on his tall but slightly-bent figure, clad in a long coat; on his gray hair, partly covered by a dark-blue skull-cap; on his picturesque beard, and on his pale, strong features, his long, straight nose, his horizontal eyebrows; and, when occasionally he steps back and turns toward you his piercing, deep-set gray eyes, you recognize his fitness to be the artist of the Shakespeare, with its calm, majestic features.
Page's manner and talk when he is painting are naturally somewhat abstracted, yet he rambles on fluently enough, letting fall. sentences containing words of deep truth in art, in philosophy, and in morals, varied with an occasional joke or bit of genial pleasantry. Now and then, when he has been some time silent, he breaks out into one of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which he knows by heart, giving strong emphasis to some particular phrase, by means of which he would elucidate the truth he has been trying to explain; and by his rendering giving such a sense of newness to the verses that one feels that he has never known half their meaning until now. The following sonnet, addressed to him by a young lady, well describes his way of reciting poetry, of which his friend James Russell Lowell says he is the best reader he ever heard:
"When the great master's strains thy lips repeat, 
My heart is hushed in listening ecstasy; 
Ever they seem more humanly complete, 
Ever the mind doth fresher beauties see. 
But when, alone, my new-found wealth I seek, 
Half must I feel a disappointed pain, 
To find their power and greeting grown so weak,
And something lost that made their beauty plain. 
The full perfection of each golden line, 
Each beauteous link of chained harmony;
The mind in these still owns an art divine, 
But heart fails quite to bear me company: 
Till thy well-loved, remembered tones I give 
To words which, at thy voice, take breath and live."

His memory for poetry is really something wonderful. He can repeat almost the whole of Shakespeare, and, we think, knows by heart all the poems of Lowell, for whom he has a most affectionate admiration, and whom he regards as the first of living poets. 
Page's skill as a draughtsman was manifested in the most striking manner at the outset of his career as an artist, and has seldom been equalled either in this country or in any other. As a colorist his excellence has been recognized by the most competent critics. Of Titian, whom he considers the greatest of all painters, he has made especial study. 
"The laws which Titian discovered have been unheeded for centuries," says an art-critic, "and they might have remained so had not the mind of William Page felt the necessity of their revival and use. To him there could be no chance-work. Art must have laws as definite and immutable as those of science; indeed, the body in which the spirit of art is developed, and through which it acts, must be science itself. He said that, if exact imitation of Nature be taken as the law in painting, then must inevitably occur the difficulty that, above a certain point, paint no longer undergoes transfiguration, thereby losing its character as mere coloring material; that, if the ordinary tone of Nature be held as the legitimate key-note, the scope of the palette would be exhausted before success could be achieved."
"No modern portraits," remarks Mr. Tuckerman, "excel, and few equal, his of Lowell, Mrs. Crawford, Robert Browning, and Charlotte Cushman." "At the risk," says a writer in the London Art Journal, "of being thought guilty of exaggeration, I declare, after visiting his studio, that Page is the best portrait painter of modern times; he has the same traits as Titian and Vernonese." 
It is true that, while following lines of experiments in other directions, Page painted many pictures in the heavy shadows and dark-colored flesh of which it is scarcely possible to recognize the painter of the gold fleece of hair floating from the head of his Venus, the color and texture of which is so lovely that it has been called the most beautiful hair there is now in the works. But, up and down the