Richard Edward Miller

Richard E. Miller was born in Saint Louis, Missouri. He attended the Saint Louis School of Fine Arts (part of Washington University) from 1893 to 1897. In 1899, after two years as a newspaper illustrator, he left for Paris to continue his art studies, enrolling at the Académie Julian, where he studied with Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. His star rose rapidly. By 1900 he had won a third place at the Paris Salon for a dark monochromatic portrait of an old woman, painted in a realistic academic manner. In 1904 he won a silver medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis; that same year and again in 1907 he sold paintings to the French government; in 1908 he was made a knight of the French Legion of Honor; in 1909 he was given a gallery of his own at the Venice Biennale, where his work was critically acclaimed. By 1912 Miller was at the pinnacle of his European career.

While in Paris, Miller had a studio on the Left Bank. He was also a popular teacher, becoming chief instructor at the Ecole Colarossi and in the summer instructing young women from an American private school in Giverny. In 1907 he married Harriet Adams, who may have been one of his students. Their only child, Elsbeth, was born in Giverny in 1909. At this time Miller began to change his painting style, adopting a brighter palette and looser brushwork. He continued painting the female figure, developing the subject he is most closely identified with: fashionable women in intimate interiors. His experiments with color, light, and brushwork resulted in a highly distinctive and decorative Post-Impressionist aesthetic.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Miller returned to the United States, painting and teaching briefly in Pasadena, California, before settling permanently in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1918. He quickly became one of the art colony's leading artists. Miller exhibited his paintings at major museums throughout the country, many of which purchased his work. He often won top prizes, such as the Medal of Honor at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, the year he was elected an academician by the National Academy of Design. In 1919 and 1921 Miller was commissioned to create four murals for the Senate Chamber of the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City. Miller received important portrait commissions, taught private students, served on juries for prestigious national exhibitions, and, during the Depression, assisted with the Federal Art Project on Cape Cod. While primarily a figure and portrait painter, Miller also painted landscapes, still lifes, marines, and nudes. Toward the end of his career he changed his style again, reverting to the darker tones and more academic handling of his earlier years. In his last years Miller spent winters in Florida. He died quite suddenly in St. Augustine, Florida, at the age of sixty-seven.