The De Wild family was a Dutch family of art professionals, including conservator-restorers, art dealers, painters, and connoisseurs. Prominent internationally in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, they were especially known for their advances in art restoration. Carel de Wild Carel de Wild was born on August 26, 1870, to Angenita Mertina Visser de Wild of Kessel, Limburg. He began his career in the arts early, studying at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague from the age of 13. Though he was initially trained in painting, the retirement of the Netherlands's top restorer Willem Anthonij Hopman necessitated a successor, and art historians Abraham Bredius and Hofstede de Groot nominated Carel for this role. Beginning in 1894, he studied restoration in Vienna and later Berlin on a scholarship from the Queen Dowager of the Netherlands. He worked at a studio in the Hague from 1895 until 1911, garnering commissions such as the controversial re-varnishing of twelve Frans Hals group portraits in Haarlem. United States After working with Goupil & Cie in Paris, Carel received an offer to work as an advisor and restorer with art dealing institution Knoedler & Co, and departed for the United States in 1911. During his time with Knoedler & Co., and subsequently at the independent practice on Fifth Avenue he opened in 1916, he worked closely with American industrialists Henry Clay Frick, Joseph Widener, and J.P. Morgan. He advised Frick on several major art purchases in the 1910s, including Vermeer's Mistress and Maid, Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington, and a Jacob Maris landscape, later restoring Frick's prized Rembrandt self-portrait. Well-known as the first to bring the so-called "Dutch method" of wax-resin lining outside the Netherlands, he was called in by a government art appraiser to give his expert opinion on a case of suspected art fraud in 1916. A firm proponent of investigating the physical properties, as much as the stylistic ones, of a given artwork, he came to disagree strongly with certain attributions made by his former mentor Bredius. In 1921, he accepted a position as professor of Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching the "technique and care of paintings." There, he was only able to give two lectures before retiring due to ill health, and died on May 12, 1922 at his home in Larchmont, New York. Derix de Wild After Carel's departure for the United States