111860

UNTRACED

Mrs Walter Hines Page, née Alice Wilson 1924

Oil [support and dimensions unknown]

No visual record of this portrait has been traced but it is thought that it is a three-quarter length, based on the fee of $866 cited by the artist in a letter to the sitter, 10 March 1924. De László painted the sitter’s husband, Walter Hines Page, American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, in 1917 [6498].

Willa Alice Wilson was born 8 June 1858, in Pontiac, Michigan to William Wilson, a physician from Scotland and his wife Alice Copeland, who died four days after her daughter’s birth. She married Walter Hines Page 15 November 1880, they had three sons, Ralph (born 1881), Arthur (born 1883) and Frank (born 1887), and a daughter, Katharine (born 1891).

The sitter died in New York 8 February 1942 at the age of 83, after twenty-six years of widowhood, and was buried with her husband in Aberdeen, North Carolina.

LITERATURE:

DLA080-0030, letter from de László to Mrs Page, 10 March 1924

KF 2016