This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Known as the Dean of Toledo 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 age fourteen when he became a student of Henry Mosler in Cincinnati. At age nineteen, he went to Europe with Mosler, studying 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 Academy Julian in Paris. He was also a student of William Merritt Chase in the United States.
Darling was especially taken with life in Holland because of the emphasis there on simple living and domestic pleasure. He established a studio in Lauren, Holland for several years, and this became a famous tourist attraction. During this period, he used Dutch families as models and became a skilled genre painter.
At the beginning of World War I, he returned to the United States, spending two years in New York City before settling in Toledo, which was near his birth place of Sandusky. He determined to make Toledo an art center and became a strict teacher of drawing and encouraged experimentation in what were then avant-garde styles of impressionism, post-impressionism, and early modern.
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Wilder M. Darling, painter and teacher was born in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1855. Little is known of "the Dean of Toledo painters" early years and his biography can only be pieced together from sketchy details. He was still in his teens in his native Sandusky, Ohio, when he chose an art career. He trained first in Cincinnati, perhaps at the McMicken School of Design under Henry Mosler. Sometime in the mid- 1 870s he went for further study to Munich, where he may have spent twelve years. It is possible that he attended the informal classes conducted by Frank Duveneck, a fellow Cincinnatian, in Munich and Polling from 1877 to 1878; he was enrolled at the Royal Academy of Munich at some time in the mid- 1880s. He seems to have received training from Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris, probably at the Academie Julian.
By 1887 he was at work with Henry Mosler, and a year later with Fernand Cormon, in Paris. He studied with William Merritt Chase, but it is uncertain where or when. By 1896 he had settled in Laren, a remote Dutch town popularized by The Hague School painters and adopted by many American artists as a place to live and to paint, and thereafter its villagers became Darling's primary subject. After 1902 he divided his time between Laren and Toledo, Ohio, giving up the Dutch studio only when America entered World War 1. He painted in New York for two years, then settled in Toledo (which was near his birth place of Sandusky) where he found both patrons and pupils. Following the academic procedures he had learned in Munich and Paris, he emphasized correct draftsmanship over color and incorporated the few modern techniques he deemed worthwhile. Darling's palette, limited to "rich monotones of red and gold and brown,"' was a distillation of his diversified training.
In his genre scenes of Dutch peasants (something he became famous for), especially the household interiors of Laren, he sought to record a picturesque life-style that was fading even in villages like Laren. He maintained standards of "the inexorable old world variety,"' using his mastery of traditional techniques to capture "archetypical vignettes" of a fleeting way of life. He was also known to paint genre, landscapes, portraits, Holland, markets, gardens and deserts. A student of Mosler, Darling may well have been influenced by Mosler's detailed Breton peasant scenes. In these works "Darling used dim Rembrandtesque lighting, generalized peasant costume detail, and a limited palette of blues, buffs, and reds to simplify the scene." Darling was just one of many American painters who saw the peasant as "a vestige of the past, unspoiled by modern civilization." It was because of this viewpoint that Darling eagerly sought to immortalize these subjects within his art for future generations to appreciate.
During his latter years in Toledo he was determined to make that city an art center and became a strict teacher of drawing and encouraged experimentation in what were then avant-garde styles of impressionism, post-impressionism, and early modern. He passed away in Toledo, Ohio in 1933.
Source:
Blake Benton Fine Arts |
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