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Mann Page II, c. 1755 Son of dynasty-founder Mann Page and grandson through his mother of the wealthy and powerful Robert "King" Carter, Mann Page II (1718–1778) was the master of Rosewell, a massive Georgian mansion—the largest in the American colonies—which his father had started and which he completed. Construction of the house nearly bankrupted Page, which possibly underlies the slightest expression of strain here, so uncharacteristic of artist John Wollaston. Nonetheless, Page seized every opportunity to commission multiple portraits of his family. Several are now owned by the College of William and Mary, including a large and impressive pair of himself and his wife with their oldest child, painted by Charles Bridges more than a decade earlier. Probably because those paintings existed, Page ordered from Wollaston only this small canvas, which could have been intended for one of his several heirs to hang in a different family house as evidence of the Page dynasty. |
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