Irving Ramsey Wiles

Illustrator, painter, and teacher Irving Ramsey Wiles was adept at portraits, figural works, and landscapes characterized by the informal elegance of cosmopolitan American art at the turn of the twentieth century. Wiles received his earliest art instruction from his father, landscape painter and teacher Lemuel M. Wiles (1826–1905), and at the age of eighteen, in 1879, exhibited his first painting at New York’s prestigious National Academy of Design. After one year’s study at the Art Students League in New York, under William Merritt Chase and J. Carroll Beckwith, Wiles went to Paris for further study. He enrolled in the Académie Julian, a popular art school among American artists, and then worked in the studio of French academic painter Carolus-Duran (1837–1917). During his student years Wiles painted watercolor street scenes of Paris, and he also traveled in Italy and in the French countryside.

Wiles returned to New York in 1884 and exhibited two of his sketches, which caught the attention of the art editor at the popular Century Magazine. The editor invited him to create illustrations for the journal. His work soon appeared in other magazines as well. To support himself, Wiles also taught at his own studio and at his father’s summer art school in upstate New York. Wiles was elected a member of the progressive Society of American Artists and of the National Academy of Design. By the late 1890s, Wiles was focusing more on portraits and figure paintings, strongly influenced by his teacher Chase, who remained a lifelong friend. Like Chase, Wiles also worked in watercolor and pastel and was active in several art organizations devoted to these media. He exhibited and received numerous awards throughout his career.

In the late 1890s, Wiles and his father moved their summer classes to Peconic, on the North Fork of New York’s Long Island, not far from Chase’s home and summer school. Peconic eventually became Wiles’s year-round home.