Irving Ramsey Wiles renounced his original plan of becoming a violinist to become a painter instead. He began his art training at the age of 17, first learning the basics from his father, Lemuel Maynard Wiles, whose studio was on Washington Square Park. Having showed considerable talent and skill, the young Wiles exhibited at the National Academy of Design just one year after he began painting. His mature style, however, began to flourish under the tutelage of established and esteemed American painters William Merritt Chase and James Carroll Beckwith with whom he studied at the Art Students League from 1879-1882. Wiles was greatly inspired by Chase’s style and skill, and the two men became great friends.

Wiles went to Paris in 1882 where he was a student of Carolus-Duran, Jules Lefebvre, and Boulanger at the Academie Julian before returning to New York in 1884. For several years he had to work for Scribner’s, Century and Harper’s magazines in order to make ends meet, as he was unable to support himself from portrait commissions alone. In 1897 Wiles was elected to the National Academy Design and was finally able to devote more time to his figurative and portrait paintings. He was widely commissioned by important clientele, including Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan. Although Wiles was known and esteemed for portraiture, he painted landscape and genre subjects as well, always working in a blend of Impressionism and Realism, styles he had adopted from his training in both the United States and France.

Seated Nude is Wiles at his best. The artist preferred painting women at their leisure, elegantly posed and fashionably dressed, or in this case undressed. These “esprit portraits,” as Charles Caffin wrote in 1907, combined the incredible technical dexterity of Wiles’s virtuoso brushwork, a technique he learned from Chase, with the artist’s ability to capture the essence of his sitters. Here the subject is much about the setting as it is about nude itself. The elegant room, replete with a Japanese screen, gold urn, flowers and boudoir chair, perfectly mirrors the grace and beauty of the sitter’s body.