LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  AMERICAN ART  / 

55

Another owner IRVING RAMSEY WILES (1861-1948) The Reader signed "Irving R. Wiles" (upper rig...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:25,000.00 - 45,000.00 USD
Another owner IRVING RAMSEY WILES (1861-1948) The Reader signed Irving R. Wiles (upper rig...
Another owner
IRVING RAMSEY WILES
(1861-1948)
The Reader
signed "Irving R. Wiles" (upper right)
oil on canvas
10 1/8 x 7 1/4 in. (25.7 x 18.4 cm)
painted circa 1900 <p>Estimate: $25,000-45,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection, Florida <p> Irving Wiles came by his artistic talent honestly. He was the son of a painter-the landscape artist Lemuel Maynard Wiles (1826-1904) - and spent much of his childhood in his father's studio and the summer art classes he held at Silver Lake, New York. To further his own career, Irving Wiles studied first at the Students League under Thomas Dewing, Carroll Beckwith, and William Merritt Chase and then, in the early 1880s, with the ubiquitous Carolus-Duran in Paris. Upon his return to New York, Wiles continued to study with William Merritt Chase at his Tenth Street Studio and soon became more than just another of Chase's many pupils. He became his protégé and good friend. The two painters traveled together in Europe in 1905 and 1910 and Wiles taught for many years at the Chase School of Art. They remained close until Chase's death in 1916. <p>All of his professional life Wiles was attracted to beauty, and preferred to depict lovely, elegantly dressed women at leisure in attractive surroundings. This small, gem-like painting, executed around 1900, painted at the height of his career, reflects this preference, and the influence of his friend and mentor, Chase. Rich, slashing brushwork produces an intense sense of immediacy. A few well-placed brushstrokes and dashes of color convey texture and form. The mood is intimate, impromptu. The model's piled hair and bodice gleam in the light of an unseen source and she leans into it, holding out her open book to catch its illumination. The thick impasto of her skirt suggests the richness of white satin without the stiff formality of carefully painted folds. For this is no society portrait commissioned by a matron anxious to flaunt her expensive finery: The Reader is more personal and more interesting - a fluid glimpse of female beauty, captured and recorded for its own sake.
Sign In to Bookmark Lot