Although Irving Wiles spent two years at the Sedgewick Institute in Great Barrington Massachusetts to prepare for a career in medicine, he decided soon after to follow his father, Lemuel, and become an artist. During the late 1870s, he helped the elder Wiles conduct a summer art school at Silver Lake New York. In 1879, the year of his first exhibited work at an Academy Annual, he entered the Art Students League for two years of study under J. Carroll Beckwith and William M. Chase. Three years later, he traveled to Paris. After a brief period at the Acad‚mies Julian and Colarossi, he emulated his teacher Beckwith by entering the atelier of his former master, Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran.
Returning to New York in Spring 1884, Wiles once again assisted his father at the Silver Lake school. He began a career of illustration work in popular magazines which lasted into the mid-1890s. Elected to the Society of American Artists in 1886, he subsequently served as its treasurer for several years. At the Academy, he won the Third Hallgarten Prize in 1886 and the Clarke Prize in 1889, prompting his election as an Associate. During this period he married Mary Lee (1887) and experimented in the watercolor and pastel media.
Wiles continued to teach--at the Art Students League, notably, in 1894-6 and 1901-3--but his painting career was also progressing well. He worked at vaguely impressionistic figure and landscape subjects in the 1890s, but by 1902 he turned his energies to fashionable portraits painted in the manner of John Singer Sargent. In this later portion of his life, he spent much of his time at a studio and home he built at Peconic, Long Island. There he began painting marines and ship pictures. As an older man, Wiles remained active in the Academy. He served on the Council (1901-4), received the Maynard (1919) and Palmer (1931) Prizes, and donated two works by James H. Cafferty (1916 and 1928). Wiles's daughter, Gladys, also became an artist.
