14 oils on panels Military - Wilder M DARLING

Wilder M DARLING 1856-1933

Known as the dean of Toledo's 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 pupil of Henry Mosler in Cincinnati.

At 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 Académie Julian in Paris. He was also a pupil of William Merritt Chase in the United States.

At the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to the United States and spent two years in New York before settling in Toledo, near his native Sandusky.