Wilder Darling

WILDER DARLING (USA, 1856-1933).
"Military."
14 panels in oil on panel.
Signed.
Measurements: 22 x 16 cm.

Being a painter specialized in the genre of the portrait, when transferring the portrait to the representation of military (in which the fundamental thing is the wardrobe), Wilder Darling adopts the same detailed and meticulous style that characterizes him. This series of military portraits, showing the clothing of each regiment, may have been commissioned by an official commission. We see Polish Cossacks and Napoleonic soldiers, among other regiments. The painting of officers and soldiers focusing on clothing has been an art form that not only documents the evolution of uniforms throughout history, but also provides a window into the social and cultural identity of each era. Wilder Darling, as did John Singer Sargent in the same era, painted portraits of officers that captured the authenticity and details of the uniforms of the time, showing the functionality and symbolism behind military dress.

Known as the dean of Toledo (Ohio) painters, Wilder Darling had a long career in Europe and then in Ohio as a painter and teacher. He was born in Sandusky, Ohio, shortly before the Civil War. In 1870, he began studying art at the age of fourteen, when he became a student of Henry Mosler in Cincinnati. At nineteen he traveled to Europe with Mosler and studied in Munich with Frank Duveneck and at the Royal Academy. Later, on another trip, he studied with Jean Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant at the Académie Julian in Paris. He was also a student of William Merritt Chase in the United States. Darling was especially attracted to life in Holland, where the emphasis was on simple living and domestic pleasure. He established a studio in Laren (Holland) for several years, which became a famous tourist attraction. During this period, he used Dutch families as models and became an expert genre painter. At the outbreak of World War I, he returned to the United States and spent two years in New York before settling in Toledo, near Sandusky, his hometown. Determined to make Toledo a center of art, he became a strict teacher of drawing and encouraged experimentation in the then avant-garde styles of impressionism, post-impressionism and early modernism.