The Little Models (Reverie)
by Irving Ramsay Wiles (1861–1948)22⅛ x 18 inches
Signed lower right: Irving R Wiles; on verso: Irving R Wiles
Provenance
Mrs. Alice Chase, wife of William Merritt Chase
Newhouse Galleries, New York, New York
Maghee, acquired from above
Sale, Thomaston Place Auction Galleries, Thomaston, Maine, July 8, 2023, lot 2043
Private collection, New York, New York, acquired from above
Exhibited
Knoedler Gallery, New York, New York, Fifteenth Annual Summer Exhibition, 1922
Literature
“The Fifteenth Annual Opens at Knoedler’s; A New Group of Paintings at the Ehrich Gallery; A Picture Fund Raised by Carnegie,” New York Tribune, July 9, 1922, 6 V.
Related Works
Costume Study, 1885, oil on canvas, 21¾ x 18¾ inches; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
Her Leisure Hour, ca. 1925, oil on canvas, 27¼ x 22½ inches; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Maria Safonoff, 1927, oil on canvas, 49 x 49 inches; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts
Note: A review of the Knoedler Gallery summer exhibition in the New York Tribune described this work, writing, “There is an infinitely charming small-scale figure and interior painting by Irving R. Wiles. It is probably not a recent work, but it has the highest feeling for good taste and for its unmixed sincerity and harmony of treatment is one of the really appealing things in the show.”[1]
[1] “The Fifteenth Annual Opens at Knoedler’s; A New Group of Paintings at the Ehrich Gallery; A Picture Fund Raised by Carnegie,” New York Tribune, July 9, 1922, 6 V.
Artist Biography
A master of both portraiture and landscape painting, Irving Ramsay Wiles used an expressive palette and brushwork in the impressionist tradition.
By Nina Sangimino
I. Biography
II. Chronology
III. Collections
IV. Exhibitions
V. Memberships
VI. Notes
VII. Suggested Resources
I. Biography
Irving Ramsay Wiles was destined to become an artist; his father Lemuel Maynard Wiles was a landscape painter who studied under William M. Hart and Jasper Francis Cropsey. Shortly after Irving’s birth in Utica, New York, the Wiles family moved to New York City in order for
