American Monotypes from the Baker/Pisano Collection | Page 71

Irving Ramsay Wiles (American, 1861–1948)
Double Portrait/Study of Two Men, One Smoking, n.d.

Monotype, 5 3/4 x 3 2/3 in.
Collection of The Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York. Gift of
the Baker/Pisano Collection, 2001.9.279

Born in Utica, New York, Irving Wiles grew up in New York
City and attended the Art Students League studying under
William Merritt Chase and J. Carrol Beckwith from 1879 to
1881. Shortly thereafter, Wiles went to Paris to study with
Gustave Boulanger at the Académie Julian. He taught classes
in his New York studio and at his father’s art school in Ingham,
New York, during the summer months. After winning several
important painting prizes, Wiles became a member and later
an academician at the National Academy of Design. In the
1890s, Wiles and his father relocated their summer art school
to Peconic, Long Island, where they eventually lived year round.
There are only three extant monotypes by Wiles. Double
Portrait/Study of Two Men, One Smoking is his stellar work in
the medium. It was only recently discovered that this monotype
was done after a section in a photograph of the Peconic Art
Colony of which Wiles was a prominent member.
NOTES:
Baker, Late Nineteenth Century and Early Modernist American Art, 33, illus.
Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 412-413.
Kiehl, “Monotypes in America in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries,” in Painterly Print, 42, fig. 32.

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