Page, Inman Edward (1853-1935)
Role: class of 1877; educatorDates: 1873-1935
Portrait Location: Library-Annex
Artist: Yarde, Richard (1939 -)
Portrait Date: 1979
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions:
Framed Dimensions:
Brown Portrait Number: 251
Brown Historical Property Number: 2204
Edward Inman Page was among Brown University's first African-American students. In 1877 he and classmate George Washington Milford became the first two Black graduates of the University. Milton went on to become a lawyer. Page went on to become an distinguished educator and academic administrator, counting Ralph Ellison among his many pupils. The Inman Page Black Alumni Council at Brown University takes its name from this visionary leader.
Inman Page was born into slavery on December 29, 1853 in Warrenton, Virginia. His parents, Horace and Elizabeth Page, were slaves on a plantation, where the young Inman Page worked as a house boy. During the Civil War, when Page was ten years old, the family escaped through Union lines, while soldiers of both the North and the South were in the area. The family moved to Washington, D.C. and Page worked as an errand boy while attending private school. He spent two years at what is now Howard University before beginning at Brown.
When Page graduated from Brown in 1877, he was elected Class Orator. He received much acclaim for his eloquent speech at graduation. The "Providence Journal" described him as "an orator of rare ability, speaking with weight and sententiousness and at times rising to a profound and impressive eloquence." A man who admired Page's senior oration persuaded him to accept a teaching position at Natchez Seminary in Mississippi. That marked the first in a series of increasingly distinguished educational successes. Page served as vice-president of the Lincoln Institution in Jefferson City, Missouri from 1878-80 and then as its president until 1898. He then served as president of Langston University, in Oklahoma, for seventeen years. He also was president of the Western Baptist College in Macon, Missouri, and Roger Williams University in Nashville, Tennessee.
According to Ellison, Page dedicated his life to bringing the New England tradition of education to the African-American population in the American South. Many of Page's students went on to serve as community leaders and teachers.
In addition to having a distinguished career, Page was also a dedicated husband and father. He married Zelia R. Ball, in 1878, with whom he had two daughters, Mary Pyrtle and Zelia N. Breaux. He received an honorary Master's degree from Brown University in 1918.
Among his other accomplishments, Inman Page served as supervising principal of Oklahoma City's segregated school system for 12 years. Upon his retirement in 1935, he was named principal emeritus in honor of his outstanding contributions to the city's school system. Page's death at age 82 in the home of his daughter, Zelia N. Breaux in Oklahoma City made banner headlines.
His funeral, in Oklahoma City, was attended by hundreds of friends, colleagues, and relatives. Hundreds of others waited "in the stiff, cold north wind" for his burial on the campus of Langston University. A local newspaper estimated that two thousand people viewed his remains.
After his death, one newspaper editorialist wrote: "Old Man Ike," as his pupils endearingly referred to him, was a terror to the disobedient and the mischievous. This was not because of any cruel penalties he visited upon them, but because his students abhorred the thought of their idol knowing of their delinquency.
"It was this peculiar hold that he had upon youth which wove out of the fabric of their lives virtue and strength of character."
The Inman Page Portraits
In 1977, the University commemorated the 100th Anniversary of Page's graduation. The occasion was marked by the presentation of a portrait of Page (BP 223) by Matthew Barros. When it was discovered that Page had been Ralph Ellison's grade school principal in Oklahoma, a second portrait of Inman Page was commissioned for Brown, this one by Massachusetts artist Richard Yarde. At a Ralph Ellison festival held at Brown in 1979, the Yarde portrait of Page was presented to the University.
A water color study of Page that Yarde completed in preparation for the oil painting was also presented to Ellison during the Festival. Yarde once quipped that perhaps the water color presented to Ellison was the better of the two paintings.
Richard Yarde
Richard Yarde (b. 1939) is one of the nation's foremost African American artists, as well as one of its greatest watercolorists. He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he teaches painting at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Yarde's work can be found in three dozen public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and at the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C.
He received the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995. In 2002, he received the Massachusetts Commonwealth Award, the state's highest honor in arts, humanities, and sciences.
Yarde received his Bachelor of Fine Arts cum laude in 1962 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1964, both from Boston University. Information on his numerous solo and group exhibitions can be found on his website.
According to the R. Michelson Galleries:
"Yarde tackles the traditionally intimate art of watercolor with uncharacteristic bravado. Unlike oil or acrylic painting, watercolor brooks no mistakes. Yet Yarde paints on a heroic scale with dazzling color, rich symbols and deeply evocative imagery."
"Critics have written, and Yarde concurs, that his body of work has been an exploration of his own history. Early on he painted with joy and verve. He would splash the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston where he grew up in the 1950s on large sheets of paper, then turn to rendering imagined scenes from the vibrant jazz world of the Harlem Renaissance."
According to American Vision magazine: "Yarde was born and reared in the Roxbury area of Boston, where his parents settled after emigrating to the United States from Barbados. He talks of growing up in a Caribbean home filled with conversations about politics and literature. Although he characterizes his family life as economically impoverished, he was reared culturally middle class. His mother, a dressmaker whom he describes as a cultured woman, enrolled him early in piano lessons and art classes."
"He took his first art class at age 9, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Watercolor was his medium from the beginning; his mother had given him his first set. By age 14, he had completed the portfolio that would qualify him for acceptance into the art program at Boston University."
Richard Yarde is married to writer Susan Donovan. They have two adult sons, Marcus and Owen. In early 1997, their first grandchild was born.