A powerful image of an old peasant woman resigned to her approaching death, this painting may be Page’s masterpiece. The stark chiaroscuro and almost monochromatic palette of deathly blacks, browns, and grays convey the woman’s condition. Her drawn and wrinkled face is propped up against a large pillow, which forms a halo around her face. With her hands tightly folded, she turns toward the right where a small glass of violets, symbols of death, rests on a bare wood table. In this vividly realist work Page displays a thorough knowledge of the human figure, based no doubt on his academic training.
This painting may have been exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1889 as La Grand-mère. A critic in the American Register noted Page’s strongly drawn and expressive figure. Another critic may have been considering Page’s painting when he deplored the large number of "funer[e]al, dolorious, or elegiac subjects" in the exhibition (Theodore Child, "The Paris Salon of 1889," Art Amateur 21 [June 1889]: 7).
George W. Lininger, who owned the painting in the early years of this century, had a large collection of old-master and nineteenth-century European and, to a far lesser extent, American paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art. He opened a gallery for his collection in Omaha in 1888 and permitted the public to visit twice weekly.
