Irving Ramsey Wiles

Illustrator, teacher, and painter 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 the influential painter-teachers William Merritt Chase and J. Carroll Beckwith, Wiles went to Paris for further study. He enrolled in the Académie Julian, a popular school among American artists, and then worked in the studio of French academic painter Charles Auguste Émile Durand, known as 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. These attracted the notice of the art editor of the popular Century Magazine, who asked the young artist to make illustrations for the journal. Wiles’s illustrations appeared in other publications as well, and he also supported himself by teaching at his 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, after one of his works won a prize there, to the National Academy of Design as an associate member; full membership followed in 1897. By that date, Wiles was able to devote himself more fully to portraits and figural compositions in oils, paintings that mark the influence of his teacher Chase, who remained a lifelong friend. Like his mentor, Wiles also worked in watercolor and pastel and belonged to several organizations devoted to those media, which enjoyed revivals in late nineteenth-century America. He exhibited his work widely and won 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. He also made several return trips to Europe, visiting Holland, Spain, Italy, and England. After an exhibition of his portraits at a New York gallery in 1910, Wiles realized considerable success as a portrait painter. He is best remembered today for his fashionable portraits of women, but he also painted landscapes and seascapes inspired by Peconic and marked by the informality, bright color, and freedom of brushstroke characteristic of impressionism. Wiles continued to paint until almost the end of his life, but his work was increasingly outmoded. By the time the artist died, on his eighty-seventh birthday, he was a virtually forgotten figure.