Biography
The son of the prominent landscape painter Lemuel Maynard Wiles, Irving Wiles achieved his own success as a painter, illustrator, and instructor in the early-twentieth century. Born in Utica, New York, Wiles learned to paint from his father and exhibited his first piece at the National Academy of Design at the age of eighteen. He went on to train under William Merritt Chase and James Carroll Beckwith at the Art Students League in New York and under Carolus-Duran, Boulanger, and Lefebvre at the Académie Julian in Paris. Chase became the major influence on his work, inspiring his animated Impressionist style and directing his interest toward figure painting and lush outdoor scenes. The two remained lifelong friends and artistic allies; before Chase’s death in 1916, he asked Wiles to complete his unfinished paintings.
In the 1890s, Wiles succeeded Chase as an instructor at the Art Students League, becoming one of the era’s most influential art teachers. As his reputation grew, Wiles received increasingly important commissions and prizes. His illustrations graced the pages of “Harper’s,” “Scribner’s,” and “Century,” and he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Society of American Arts, and the American Federation of Artists, among other important groups. Wiles was also commissioned to paint portraits of President Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryant and was one of eight painters selected for the National Art Committee, assigned with painting the history of World War I.
Before retiring to Peconic, Long Island, Wiles accumulated an impressive list of honors and prizes. He won gold medals from the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition of 1901, the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, the Buenos Aires Exposition of 1910, and the San Francisco Exposition of 1915, and additional medals and prizes from the Paris Expositions of 1889 and 1900, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, the American Water Color Society, and the Society of American Artists. Today, his work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid.
