Irving Ramsay Wiles (1861-1948)

According to Geoffrey K. Fleming, "The [present] work is strongly related to Wiles’ famous painting The Sonata (Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, California), completed in 1889, which features a similarly dressed pair of women at a piano...it is very unusual to find a non-portrait, genre work of this size, especially one that is not a landscape. In my opinion it was painted specifically for exhibition purposes, to showcase the abilities of the artist during an early part of his career." (unpublished letter, dated October 4, 2017)

We would like to thank Geoffrey K. Fleming, Executive Director of the Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia, for his assistance with cataloguing this lot.