Studies of Figures and Animals

William Page's sketch page demonstrates the working method of nineteenth-century academic artists. Multiple studies of heads, a horse, and a seated figure appear in varying degrees of finish, rendered in ink and pencil on aged paper. Page, a Hudson River School painter born in Albany in 1811, used such compositional studies to develop forms before committing them to large-scale canvases. The loose, exploratory quality of these sketches reveals the artist's process of refining anatomy and proportion—essential practice for the figure painting that dominated American portraiture and historical subjects of the era.