Victor De Wilde, painter, printmaker, designer and teacher, was born to Alfons and Clarranea De Wilde in Tamise, Belgium on 4 April 1903. His family immigrated from Belgium and arrived in New York on 19 November 1919. They are listed in the 1920 census as living on a farm in Delta, Colorado. Victor moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he studied at the California School of Fine Arts, as well as the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland, California (now the California College of the Arts, CCA, in San Francisco). De Wilde was married in July 1925 to Thelma Bryan in Alameda. In the 1930 census, he is living with his wife and child in Berkeley, California. He became an instructor at Commerce Evening High School while working for the WPA's Art Education division during the Depression, and later taught at the CCA.

De Wilde was a member of and exhibited with the San Francisco Art Association, the California Watercolor Society, and the California Society of Etchers. He was one of forty artists included in the exhibition Watercolors by Contemporary California Artists, which opened in October 1938 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Some of the other artists were James Budd Dixon, George Harris, Helen Forbes, Victor Arnautoff, Dong Kingman, and Marion Cunningham. De Wilde also exhibited at the Oakland Art Gallery from 1936-1940, the 1939 New York World's Fair, the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, the 1940 California State Fair and, in 1941, there was a solo exhibition of his watercolors at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now the Museum of Modern Art). In August 1949, the exhibition Paintings by Harry O. Baker, Karl Baumann and Victor De Wilde was mounted at the Francisco Museum of Art. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of California Art.

In 1974, Victor De Wilde moved to Cazadero in rural Sonoma County, California. He died in Sebastopol, California on 28 August 1977.