Hailed throughout his career as a leading American portraitist and figure painter, Irving Ramsey Wiles enjoyed both critical and commercial success. He was a consummate painter of all things beautiful and remained focused on his preferred subject matter of lovely young women and dashing impressionist landscapes until his death.

Wiles came of age as an artist in America during a period of great change. Long overshadowed by their European counterparts, American artists slowly began to challenge the convention that they lived in a cultural backwater by applying innovative European techniques to distinctly American subjects. Wiles trained with some of the most progressive proponents of the new cosmopolitan spirit in American painting at the Art Students League in New York. While Thomas Wilmer Dewing and J. Carroll Beckwith were important instructors, William Merritt Chase exerted the most lasting influence over Wiles, with the two becoming close personal friends until Chase’s death in 1916.

Woman at a Table is Wiles at his best. The artist preferred painting women at their leisure, elegantly posed and fashionably dressed. 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 charm and character of his sitters. Here Wiles’s subject looks wistfully as she eats alone at an empty table. The viewer is left to speculate about the narrative content of the work, but the lack of significant action is very much in keeping with Wiles’s artistic intentions. He was more interested in capturing the beauty of a particular moment and used vibrant splashes of color, as seen in the orange bows, and special effects of light, as seen in the myriad reflective surfaces, to communicate the elegant interior scenes he was best known for painting.