Richard Emil Miller

Richard E. Miller
Richard E. Miller
Born	(1875-03-22)March 22, 1875 St. Louis, Missouri
Died	January 23, 1943(1943-01-23) (aged 67) St. Augustine, Florida, United States
Education	Studied with Edmund H. Wuerpel, Lawton Parker, Jean-Paul Laurens, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant
Known for	Painting
Movement	American Impressionism, Decorative Impressionism
Awards	National Academician; Bronze Medal, Pan-American Exposition, 1901; Silver Medal, St. Louis World's Fair, 1904; Silver Medal, Paris Salon, 1904; Chevalier de La Legion D'honneur

Richard E. Miller (March 22, 1875 – January 23, 1943) was an American Impressionist painter and a member of the Giverny Colony of American Impressionists. Miller was primarily a figurative painter, known for his paintings of women posing languidly in interiors or outdoor settings. Miller grew up in St. Louis, studied in Paris, and then settled in Giverny. Upon his return to America, he settled briefly in Pasadena, California 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 New York and an award winning painter in his era, honored in both France and Italy, and a winner of France's Legion of Honor. Over the past several decades, he has been 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.

Richard Edward Miller was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, which was then one of the largest and most prosperous American cities. His father, Richard Levi Miller, was a well-respected civil engineer from Pennsylvania, who specialized in bridges and his mother was Esmerelda Story, a native of Missouri. Miller began drawing and painting as a boy and first worked as an assistant to George Eichbaum, a portrait painter. He studied art at the Washington University School of Fine Arts (f. 1879), first in evening classes in 1891, then as a full-time student in 1892. This was the first art school in the United States that was part of a university and it relied on the French Beaux-Arts method of curriculum. The courses he took in Drawing, Modeling, Painting, Artistic Anatomy, Perspective, and Composition would have been very similar to what a student in France would have received at that time. Miller was known for his work ethic and excelled at the School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Halsey C. Ives, the first director of the school and perhaps Lawton Parker.

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