Richard Emil Miller

(born 22 March 1875 St. Louis, Missouri; died 1943) American painter. Richard Emil Miller, also known as Richard Edward Miller, was a member of the Giverny Group, the second generation of American Impressionists to work in France during the early twentieth century. Miller started his artist training at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. He received a scholarship from the school to study in France; he enrolled at Julians from 1898 to 1901. Early in his career Miller was an academic artist painting in the Realist style. His works featured a muted palette with dark colors. He achieved considerable success in France early on when one of his portraits was accepted into the Paris Salon. In 1905 he traveled to Giverny, where his friend and fellow artist Frederick Carl Frieseke leased a house next to Claude Monet. It was here that Monet heavily influenced Miller’s style. Miller started to paint exterior scenes at Giverny with looser brushstrokes and a brighter, more luminous palette. In 1906 he started teaching the students of Mary C. Wheeler, who ran an art school for women based in Providence, Rhode Island. Each summer Wheeler would rent a house in Giverny for her and her pupils where they would study for the season. In 1907 Miller married one of Wheeler’s students, Harriette Adams, and they had one child together in 1909. Miller remained in France for fifteen years until he returned to the United States in 1914, however not before selling four of his paintings to the French government, receiving a gold medal from the Paris Salon and being made knight of the French Legion of Honor. In 1915 he taught with Guy Rose at the Pasadena Stickney School of Art in California and in 1918 he co-founded with Edmund Greacen the Provincetown Artists Colony in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he remained until his death.