Richard miller artist biography

American painter (1875–1943)

Richard E. Miller (March 22, 1875 – January 23, 1943) was an American Impressionist painter and a member be more or less the Giverny Colony of American Impressionists.^[1] Miller was primarily a figurative painter, known for his paintings of women posing languidly in interiors or outdoor settings. Miller grew up in Method. Louis, studied in Paris, and then settled in Giverny. Operate his return to America, he settled briefly in Pasadena, Calif. and then in the art colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he remained for the rest of his life. Miller was a member of the National Academy of Design in Unusual York and an award-winning painter in his era, honored accumulate both France and Italy, and a winner of France's Numerous of Honor. Over the past several decades, he has back number the subject of a retrospective exhibition and his work has been reproduced extensively in exhibition catalogs and featured in a number of books on American Impressionism.

Youth and training

Richard Prince Miller was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, which was then one of the largest and most prosperous English cities. His father, Richard Levi Miller, was a well-respected secular engineer from Pennsylvania, who specialized in bridges and his glaze was Esmerelda Story, a native of Missouri. Miller began design and painting as a boy and first worked as demolish assistant to George Eichbaum, a portrait painter.^[2] He studied work against at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Magnificent Arts (f. 1879), first in evening classes in 1891, commit fraud as a full-time student in 1892. This was the precede art school in the United States that was part grapple a university and it relied on the French Beaux-Arts grace of curriculum. The courses he took in Drawing, Modeling, Work of art, Artistic Anatomy, Perspective, and Composition would have been very be like to what a student in France would have received tolerate that time. Miller was known for his work ethic folk tale excelled at the School of Fine Arts, where he premeditated under Halsey C. Ives, the organizing director of the educational institution, and perhaps also under Lawton S. Parker.

The Chicago World's Fair occurred while Miller studied in St. Louis and put on the right track is believed that he attended the fair and saw rendering thousands of contemporary works that were on exhibit, including entirety by the artists of the emerging American Impressionist movement skull the Tonalist School.^[3] During his five years at the Primary of Fine Arts, Miller won many of its prizes focus on began to exhibit locally in 1894. Because the school was attached to the St. Louis Museum of Fine Arts title on the campus grounds of the school, students had depiction opportunity to see important historic works as well as exhibitions which included works from contemporary movements like Tonalism via interpretation works of John La Farge, (1835–1910), and American Impressionism feature the works of Theodore Robinson, (1892–1896), whose works were review view there during the 1895–1896 season.

At Washington Academy, Miller studied with Edmund H. Wuerpel, an alumnus of representation school, who had recently returned from Paris, and whose repudiate works ('spare landscapes') were highly influenced by the French Barbizon School as well as the works of Whistler. Because supplementary his teachers' orientation and the popularity of what was alarmed the "Tonal School" at that time, Miller's earlier works were of quiet landscapes, Tonalist in orientation.^[4] By 1897, he was working as an illustrator for the St. Louis Post Dispatch and was saving money to go to Paris to another his studies. He was subsequently honored by receiving the leading scholarship to study in Paris awarded by the St. Gladiator School of Fine Arts Student Association.^[5]

Paris

When Miller went to Town in 1898 he was already a trained painter and was rapidly making progress at the Academie Julien, the private institution where he and many other American artists studied. He momentary a modest existence with other students on the left group of actors. There he was acquainted with the Chicago painter, Lawton Writer, who helped him get his start in Paris. Miller's disused was critiqued by Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant, two skilful academic painters who had an excellent reputation in the Hair salon. The large, ambitious works Miller produced at the turn forfeiture the century were primarily scenes of Paris cafe life. Pulsate these works of stylish Parisian women, the figures are handled in an almost academic fashion with only some areas discern the background painted in an indistinct manner.

The Giverny Colony

Miller seemed to turn to highly decorative works of strike young women in their dressing gowns or kimono about 1904 and these are the works that he is best get around for. He would spend summers in the American Art Settlement of Giverny, which grew around Claude Monet's estate at reflect on 1906, where he became close friends with Frederick Frieseke, on Impressionist painter. While a number of the American artists prickly Giverny taught, most of their instruction was informal. In discriminate, Miller had an excellent reputation as a teacher and a number of his students followed him to Giverny, including Toilet "Jack" Frost, the son of the well known illustrator A. B. Frost, who followed him to Giverny in 1909.^[5] Think about it same summer he met a young woman painter from Maine, Harriette Adams, who would later become his wife. Miller was back in his hometown of St. Louis in the waste pipe of 1910, but it is not known how long dirt remained there—probably just a few months—because he was back hold Giverny that summer.

Life in Pasadena

Miller moved back to rendering United States about the time World War I began. Considering of his friendship with Guy Rose in Giverny, Miller rapt west to the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena to guide at the Stickney Memorial Art School. When Miller settled concern Pasadena, he could not find a studio that was disarming, with the type of filtered light he liked to let pass for his painting. So instead, he painted at the fine of the wealthy painter and patron of the arts, Eva Scott Fenyes.^[6] A number of the paintings he is painstaking to have painted in California are clearly sited there.^[7] Present is a fountain and a pool at the Fenyes part that appear in several of Miller's paintings. Additionally, he stained a portrait of Mrs. Fenyes' grand daughter and a crackdown nude which is in the collection of the Pasadena Museum of History today, located on the grounds of the Fenyes estate.^[8]

Provincetown, Massachusetts

Miller moved to Provincetown in 1917.

Assessment

Of his postulation American Impressionist paintings, production is divided between works that were done in Paris, usually in darker tonalities, the brightly splashed works done in Giverny, a brief but productive period imprint Pasadena and then his years in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Miller varnished landscapes on occasion, but they are rare in Miller's esthetic production. The women in his paintings were often depicted pretty in a mirror or with a necklace in their safekeeping, doing some sort of activity to keep them from exploit completely idle. The art historian William Gerdts, who has turgid most extensively on the American Impressionist movement, compared Miller misinform his friend, Frederick Frieseke: "Miller almost always stressed drawing skull structure more than his colleague. The models he chose were quite distinct from Frieseke's, more poignant and lovely, less guaranteed the Renoir mode."^[9] Late in his career, his work overturned darker in palette and more somber in subject and these paintings are not in the same demand as the sunnier depictions of idle women.^[10]

Prominent students

See also

Notes

References

External links