Irving Ramsey Wiles

American (1861-1948)

Irving Ramsey Wiles was born in Utica, New York, in 1861. He first studied art with his father, landscape painter Lemuel Maynard Wiles. In 1879 he moved to New York City where he studied at the Art Students League with Thomas W. Dewing, James Carroll Beckwith and William Merritt Chase. He moved to Paris in 1882 where he studied under Carolus-Duran, John Singer Sargent’s teacher, returning to New York in 1884. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design, American Water Color Society and Society of American Artists and won a number of prestigious awards. Beginning in the early 1890s, Wiles achieved recognition for his fashionable interior genre scenes and society portraits of women and children and in 1902 his portrait of the actress Julia Marlowe was exhibited at the National Academy. Wiles would continue to receive portrait commissions from America’s elite through the 1920s. He also painted notable Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan. In 1919 he was selected by the National Art Committee to paint portraits for a pictorial history of World War I. Along with John White Alexander and Cecilia Beaux, Wiles was one of the most popular American portraitists active during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Wiles’ paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.