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Dimensions: 21 1/4 by 25 1/2 in.
(54 by 64.8 cm)
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Provenance: Acquired by the present owner's grandmother, circa 1920
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Notes: Marie-Louise Kane writes, "Based on the subject--a figure seated by the edge of a river--and the style of this painting, I would date it ca. 1910-1911 and would suggest it was painted in Giverny, France. Well-known as an expatriate American artist in France by 1910, Miller started spending summers regularly in Giverny by 1907, joining other American artists drawn, in a late wave, to the picturesque Seine valley village that had been Monet's permanent residence since 1883. Although Miller had for some time been painting decorative, energetically brushed canvases of finely dressed women in interiors--to critical acclaim--it wasn't until around 1910 that his outdoor work shifted from subdued, tonal canvases to more intense, light and color-filled paintings. Among these richly textured, pastel-hued works is a series of women seated under trees on a riverbank or quietly adrift in a rowboat. Protypical of the series is Summer Reverie (Detroit Institute of Arts) which Miller exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1912. Another is Summer Idyl (private collection) which appeared in an art journal in 1914. In tone and setting the series evokes Monet's earlier series Mornings on the Seine (near Giverny).
"Resting by the Riverbank is an unusually fresh version of the outdoor theme, in which the figure's loosened hair, cascading over her left shoulder, and loosened bodice, revealing her right breast, signal a particularly intimate moment. With a deft repertoire of bold, shimmering strokes and silvery pastel hues, Miller knits the figure to the landscape. He has absorbed the decorative tenets of the Nabis, for whom surface texture enhanced the reconciliation of nature and decoration. Miller's fellow expatriate colleagues Frederick Frieseke, Guy Rose and Lawton Parker, also took up the theme of women reposing near or on the local river Epte, a branch of the Seine. Exhibiting their Giverny work in New York late in 1910 they elicited the following in a review in The New York Telegraph: 'These men are impressionistic painters of the very best sort. Their work is on a par with the older and better known men. Their art is strong and optimistic, the kind that drives away the blues and rings true.'"
