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 Laren, 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.

Source:
Peter Hastings Falk, Editor, Who Was Who in American Art