Catherine Wiley

Anna Catherine Wiley (January 18, 1879 – May 16, 1958) was an American artist active primarily in the early twentieth century. After training with the Art Students League of New York and receiving instruction from artists such as Lloyd Branson and Frank DuMond, Wiley painted a series of impressionist works that won numerous awards at expositions across the Southern United States, and have since been displayed in museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morris Museum of Art. In 1926, Wiley was institutionalized after suffering a mental breakdown, and never painted again.

Life

Wiley was born in Coal Creek, Tennessee (modern Rocky Top), the daughter of Edwin Floyd Wiley and Mary McAdoo Wiley. She was the granddaughter of prominent attorney and businessman, William Gibbs McAdoo, Sr., and niece of U.S. Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, Jr. Her father worked in the coal mining industry, but in 1882 the family moved to Knoxville (their house on Laurel Avenue still stands). In November 2012, the Knoxville Museum of Art and Knox County's Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection pooled their resources to purchase another Wiley painting, entitled "Morning Milking Time," for $77,000.

Works

Wiley has been described as Knoxville's "one noted impressionist." Like many impressionists during this period, she was influenced by the work of French painter Édouard Manet. Her best-known works tend to depict women and interiors, and are characterized by vivid color and brushstroke. Her style drifted toward abstract impressionism later in her career.

The Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection (a division of the Knox County Public Library system) owns the largest collection of Wiley's works, with more than three dozen paintings, about a dozen drawings, and her scrapbooks. Several of the McClung Collection's paintings are on display at the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville. The Knoxville Museum of Art owns three Wiley paintings and four drawings. Wiley's work has been displayed in various museums across the country, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, the Charleston Renaissance Gallery, and the Greenville Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina.

List of selected works

Artist's Mother Before a Window (n.d.) Haystacks (n.d.) Landscape with Gazebo (n.d.) Girl in Blue (1907) Willow Pond (1914) A Sunlit Afternoon (c. 1915) Morning (1921) Tennessee Landscape (c. 1921) By the Arbor (1923)