Arthur B. Wilder (1857-1949) American, Pastel on Paper Still Life. Shows several pots with plants in them. Signed bottom right and dated 1937. 

Overall Size: 26 3/4 x 22 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 14 x 10 in. 

Arthur B. Wilder was born on April 23rd, 1857 in Poultney, Vermont. At age five he began drawing after getting encouragement from a visiting artist named Frederick Hitch, and took watercolor classes with a woman in Saratoga Springs. By the time he was in his teens he was already painting in oils and watercolors, and went on to become a noted New England landscape painter and printmaker who also produced etchings, lithographs, and sketches in charcoal and graphite. In his twenties he studied at the Art Students’ League of New York with Thomas Dewing, Charles Yardley Turner, and William Sartain, as well as at the Brooklyn Art Guild School with the well known American realist painter Thomas Eakins for six months. When Eakins was kicked out of the school in January of 1884, Arthur went back to the Art Students League. He spent 1885 in Virginia helping his father supervise the building of a railroad, eventually making enough money to properly propose to Juliet McBurney Hill, the head of the Atheneum Library. He rapidly became a member of the American Federation of Arts and the Mid Vermont Art Association in Rutland. Select exhibitions included shows at the National Academy of Design in 1886, the Boston Art Club, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Watercolor Society, the New Detroit Museum, and one of his winter paintings was exhibited at the White House during the Coolidge Administration. In his middle and later years Wilder resided in Woodstock, Vermont with his wife and six children, and some of his murals can be found in rooms at the Woodstock Inn where he worked as the manager from the early 1890s until 1938. After his wife died that same year, he shifted more to making still lifes, and painted mostly around his house or went on sketching trips with family members. He was still painting on the day he died, February 15th, 1949.