On the Veranda

In Irving Ramsey Wiles’s On the Veranda, three young women enjoy a summer afternoon’s leisure on the wide, columned porch of a country home in a verdant setting. Seen at a distance part-way down the open but sheltered space, two figures sit in a pool of soft afternoon sunlight that slants through the railing to cast striped shadows on the wood plank floor. Their chairs have been drawn together as if for intimate conversation, but their postures suggest mutual isolation. One of the women, dressed in white and holding a blue, Japanese-style fan, rests her chin in her hand in a gesture of pensive reverie; her pink-gowned companion, back to the viewer, reads a newspaper. They appear unaware of a fashionably dressed young woman who stands leaning against the veranda railing, her head turned toward the house but her features obscure; her hat and parasol suggest she is ready for a walk and perhaps awaits a companion. The line of hanging laundry at the far end of the veranda, the mismatched chairs, and the open gate interject an informal domesticity to the scene.

For a decade after his return in 1884 from his art studies in Paris, Wiles spent summers teaching at the Silver Lake Art School, which his father, landscape painter Lemuel M. Wiles (1826–1905), operated near his birthplace of Perry, in western New York State. That setting inspired the younger Wiles to paint several genre scenes, or scenes of everyday life, of which On the Veranda is typical in its celebration of the pleasures and informality of country life. Models for these figural works were the artist’s female students and, after his marriage in 1887, his wife, Mary “May” Lee, who appears in this painting as the woman in white, the only figure whose face is clearly visible to the viewer.

In the decades following the American Civil War, American artists turned their attention to themes of middle-class leisure. Symbols of the peace and prosperity of America’s so-called Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s, women and children in domestic settings began to displace men and outdoor masculine pursuits in genre painting. Wiles’s On the Veranda echoes such works as Winslow Homer’s Croquet Match, (TF 1999.72) also in the Terra Foundation’s collection, which similarly pictures fashionable young women gathered on a veranda. Ironically, as such works reiterated the theme of female leisure, American women were beginning to fight for and enjoy increasing opportunities in education and professional work. The Silver Lake Art School, for example, was one of many that prospered by serving a burgeoning number of aspiring women artists. Even as they posed for Wiles’s idyllic scenes, his female models embodied revolutionary changes that would challenge the confinement of women to the fashionable idleness he depicted.

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