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About Richard E. Miller
Miller was one of the significant members of the third generation of American expatriate painters in Giverny, an artist of international distinction. In 1893, eighteen year-old Miller enrolled in the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, a branch of Washington University. Five years later, he received a traveling scholarship, which allowed him to study in Europe. In Paris, Lawton Parker took Miller to the Académie Julian (1898-1901) where he became a student under Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. Miller’s earliest paintings executed in Paris are highly naturalistic, almost in a Flemish manner. This gave way to the driving influence of impressionism, which became his means to render contemporary French genre. For the most part, he concentrated on the single figure in an intimate setting. Early on, Miller won awards: a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1901, a bronze medal for a portrait at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in the same year, and another gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1904. Miller significantly lightened his palette for his plein-air studies and began a series of Parisian street scenes, some of which depicted the grand city at night. Miller also underwent Whistler’s influence. Declared hors concours, Miller was hired to teach at the Académie Colarossi, and finally he was honored with the coveted Légion d’Honneur.
Miller discovered Giverny around 1906 where he taught at Mary C. Wheeler’s summer school. Meanwhile, he made an impact internationally, exhibiting in Venice in 1905, 1907 and 1909, where he was acclaimed by critics. He and Frieseke traveled to Italy to see a gallery of their paintings at the Venice Biennale. By 1910, Miller had learned the principal tenets of impressionism and adapted them to suit his personal style, contrasting large areas of color with dot and dash patterns of fat pigment to produce an overall balance of surface texture and a striking, decorative surface. To summarize Miller’s philosophy, the artist once reported that "art’s mission is not literary, the telling of a story, but decorative, the conveying of a pleasant optical sensation."
The painter’s landscapes are more rare. There is an early Brittany Road, painted in 1900, which Marie Louise Kane rightly compares to William Lamb Picknell’s famous Road to Concarneau (Corcoran Gallery of Art). Then a late work, Landscape, Provincetown, is from the 1930s. Landscape with Figure falls somewhere in between. It has an especially free use of thick impasto textures and shows heavy scumbling. The brushwork in the foreground seems arbitrary and expressive. The ultimate effect is glowing and dream-like. |
Paintings by Richard E. Miller
| Landscape with Figure |
| oil on canvas: 16¼ x 13½ inches |
| signed: lower right |
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