Richard E. Miller

Richard E. Miller was an American painter who holds a high place in the American School of Impressionism, he was especially known for his paintings of female figures in sunlit interiors. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri and began the study of art at age 10. From 1893 to 1897, he attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and then got a job as an illustration artist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. He earned a scholarship to go to Paris in 1898, and studied at the Academie Julian with Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens, shortly thereafter in 1901, he became a teacher at the Academie Colarossi.
While in Paris he became an integral part of the American Impressionist art colony -- there he lived, worked and painted during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, staying from 1898 to 1914 until the beginning of World War I. While in France he was recognized by the French government who bestowed the distinguished award of Chevalier in the Legion of Honor upon him. Miller's early painting was tonalistic, and included a series of Parisian nocturnes, but his association with Frederic Frieseke lightened his palette -- in Paris his good friends were Guy Rose, Frederick Frieseke, and Lawton Parker, together they painted at Giverny and socialized with Claude Monet at his Monet's home.
Returning to the United States, he taught at the Stickney School in Pasadena, California from 1915 to 1917 and was a member of the California Art Club, dedicated to "plein-air" painting. He then became a prominent painter in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Provincetown, Rhode Island where, as a teacher at the Mary Wheeler School, he took students to Giverny, France for many successive summers.
He died in 1943 in St. Augustine, Florida.