Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, Paris, France.
Private collection, New Windsor, New York, acquired from the above, circa 1981.
Sale, Mid-Hudson Galleries, Salisbury Mills, New York, November 14, 2020, lot 73.
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

This lot is accompanied by a letter dated March 16th, 2021 from Marie Louise Kane, the foremost authority on the work of Richard Edward Miller and author of the monograph, A Bright Oasis: The Paintings of Richard E. Miller. We wish to thank Marie Louise Kane for her kind assistance in cataloging this lot.

Young Woman at Her Dressing Table is a resplendent example of Richard Edward Miller's celebrated paintings depicting young women in opulent interiors produced during his years spent working and living in Giverny and Paris, France. Miller enjoyed portraying women in close quartered, luxurious environments surrounded by fine furnishings, jewels, and floral arrangements either in a state of repose or actively refreshing themselves and did so in a unique Impressionistic style of soft brushstrokes and vibrant color. The present work beautifully demonstrates Miller's mastery of style and luminous color to produce elegant, richly detailed impressionistic canvases.

Miller was born in 1875 in St. Louis, Missouri and as early as 1891, went on to study at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts in the night school. His training was primarily with faculty members who received their education in Europe and worked in the more academic traditions of painting, such as Edmund Wuerpel (1866-1958). While still a student, Miller's work was accepted into the St. Louis Expositions of 1895 and 1896 where he had the privilege of having his work exhibited alongside notable American masters, such as Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) and William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) and was exposed to the work of Claude Monet (1840-1926). In 1899, Miller was awarded a scholarship that enabled him to travel to Paris and enroll in the Académie Julian where he studied under French artists Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902) and Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921). Miller's career began to flourish in Paris with notable inclusions at the Salon and by 1905, Miller was successfully breaking away from the conservative training of his younger years for a more colorful and spontaneous painting technique. By 1907, he is noted as summering in Giverny along with his contemporaries of the Giverny Group, Edmund William Graecen (1876-1949), Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939), Guy Rose (1867-1925) and Lawton Silas Parker (1868-1954). By 1910, Miller came into his mature style of dynamic brushstrokes and individual color harmonies applied to his favored subject of young women in intimate interiors.

The landscape of Giverny did not inspire Miller to shift his focus away from figurative works. Instead, the world that Miller was drawn to and portrayed was a feminine one in which women live with little concern, enjoying themselves and the objects that surround them. Miller spent his career mastering the balance between the firm construction and anatomical considerations of figure painting with those of the dissolution of form and emphasis on environment found in traditional impressionism. As seen in the present work, Miller's female figure is carefully drawn and strongly modeled. For the composition, Miller employs more geometric devices to define the interior space in which the figure sits by placing the furniture at inclined angels that naturally carry the eye through the scene. Arguably, Miller's most effective and recognizable device was the use of slatted Venetian blinds, as seen behind the young woman in the present work. The repeated parallel lines that the blinds create reinforce the geometric structure of the composition while simultaneously introducing natural light into the scene that appears to shimmer off the polished surfaces of the dressing table and the hand mirror. Through the blinds, Miller beautifully depicts the bright greens, pinks, and yellows of the abundant landscape just outside that contrast with the muted and darker tones of the woman's dress, the chair she sits in, the dressing table, and her skin tone. Miller repeatedly uses a wider and darker range of color in his works, experimenting with tantalizing shades of green and purple and found ways to emphasize the glistening quality of reflective surfaces.

According to Marie Louise Kane, foremost authority on the work of Richard Edward Miller and author of the monograph, A Bright Oasis: The Paintings of Richard E. Miller, the present work is believed to have been painted in France, likely in St. Jean-du-Doigt, Brittany where Miller is known to have rented a house and studio in 1912. Kane notes in a letter discussing the present work that the "Works he created there share several common features: white door frames and window blinds, deep wicker chairs in which the model is seated, rectangular wood dressing tables skirted with floral fabric, open jewelry cases with red objects in them, hand-held oval mirrors and long coral necklaces. These features (with the exception of the chair type) are most impressively seen in Reverie (circa 1913, Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri) and in Sunlight (circa 1913, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois). Miller was known to dress and drape his models in garments and fabrics he kept in his studio and surrounding them with set furnishings/props he also kept at hand. The chair in this painting, very little of which is visible, conforms to a type of wicker chair seen more fully in other of his St. Jean-du-Doigt paintings, as does the model (not Miller's wife)." (unpublished letter, March 16, 2021)

Miller spent his summers from 1912-14 painting in St. Jean-du-Doigt until the outbreak of the First World War in August of 1914, when he was forced to leave France and return to the United States. By late 1914, Miller was permanently back in the United States, settling in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1917 where he helped found the famous art colony there and taught classes, concentrating on his beloved, visually pleasing scenes of women in gardens and sunlit interiors until his death in 1943. Each work that Miller produced, including the present work followed his belief that "art's mission is not literary, the telling of a story, but decorative, the conveying of a pleasant optical sensation." (R. Zellman, American Art Analog, New York, 1986, p. 764) Young Woman at Her Dressing Table gracefully exhibits Miller's unique and highly praised mature Impressionist style.