The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

After teaching summer sessions at the Silver Lake Art School in upstate New York in the mid-1890s—the curriculum had been established in 1895 by his father, the landscape painter Lemuel Wiles (1826–1905)—the American painter and illustrator Irving Ramsey Wiles established a home and studio at Peconic in about 1920. Here the last years of his life would nearly dovetail with the advent of Abstract Expressionism. It is the tale of two distinct, generational histories. Wiles came of age as a painter under the Impressionist tutelage of William Merritt Chase, at the Art Students League, following closely on the League’s founding in 1878. After pursuing Chase to his Tenth Street studio for further instruction (they would remain lifelong friends), Wiles studied in the early 1880s at the Académie Julian in Paris, as well as in the studio of the French naturalist painter Charles-Auguste-Émile Duran (Carolus-Duran). Wiles effectively retraced the footsteps of his close American colleague John Singer Sargent, whose dashing brushwork Wiles apparently appropriated for his own mastery of portraiture. He supported himself in the United States from the mid-1880s through the mid-1890s as a portraitist and an illustrator for several mass-circulation periodicals, such as Century, Harper’s Weekly, and Scribner’s; he also taught at the Art Students League, while building a reputation as a first-rate portraitist and figure painter. By the late 1890s he was a member of the Society of American Artists, and in 1897 was elected an associate to the National Academy of Design. [Gregory Galligan]