Irving Ramsey Wiles was born in Utica, New York in 1861, the son of artist Lemuel Maynard Wiles, who taught his son the basics of art at a young age. Wiles attended the Sedgwick Institute in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and had his first exhibition at seventeen at the National Academy of Design. At his father’s encouragement, Wiles enrolled at the Arts Students League, New York under J. Carroll Beckwith and William Merritt Chase. Chase became the greatest influence on Wiles’s art, and became a life-long friend; upon Chase’s death he chose Wiles to carry out unfinished portrait commissions. In 1882 Wiles headed to Paris where he initially studied under Carolus-Duran. He then enrolled at the Academie Julian where he was taught by Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. After just over a year, Wiles returned to New York where he began to make a living for himself by painting portraits as well as illustrating  Harper’s, Scribner’s and Century magazines. In 1897 he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design. He continued to exhibit widely including at the Brooklyn Art Association, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery, National Academy of Design (where he won the Hallgarten Prize), and Le Salon in Paris. His reputation as the premier portrait artist of the east coast even earned him the opportunities to have President Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryant sit for him. In 1895 he and his father began to teach summer art classes at Silver Lake Art School on North Fork, Long Island. Around this time Wiles purchased a studio on Peconic, where he continued to spend every summer until his death in 1948. Irving Ramsey Wiles is represented in premier art collections nationwide including that of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Portrait Gallery, The Corcoran Gallery, and the Smithsonian, to name just a few.