Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, Switzerland, 1990s.
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

Exhibited
Liége, Belgium, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Liége, April 27-November 6, 1905, p. 393, no. 51.

Literature
"Success of American Artists at Liege Exposition," Evening Star, Washington, D.C., November 6, 1905, no. 16,478, p. 12. (as Mother and Child)
(probably) American Art News, New York, December 30, 1905, vol. IV, no. 12, p. 4. (as Mother and Child)
J.A.M. Bienenstock, The Forgotten Episode: Nineteenth Century American Art in Belgian Public Collections, exhibition catalogue, Brussels, Belgium, 1987, p. 30, fn. 15.

This lot is accompanied by a letter dated September 11, 2024, from Marie Louise Kane, scholar 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 preparing the following essay.

A star student at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts who received scholarship money from the school's Art Students Association to continue his studies in France, Richard E. Miller arrived in Paris in the spring of 1899, enrolling immediately in the Académie Julian. A year later, not yet 25, he had a painting accepted into the Paris Salon (Société des Artistes Français), where it received a third-place medal. Portrait (later known as At Her Devotions), a dark painting of a pious old woman holding a Bible, was the kind of Academically painted genre, that was a Salon staple at the time. When the painting was exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute that fall, a reviewer, writing for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, wrote, "...it is predicted that the Western Boy [Miller] will be seen henceforth in every exhibition of American paintings."

And so, it ensued. By the time Miller exhibited Mère et Enfant at the 1905 Universal and International Exposition of Liège (Belgium), he had exhibited in five more Paris Salons, winning a second-class medal and becoming hors concours in 1904, the year the French government bought the first of his paintings (They would eventually acquire three more). Miller sent some of these early works to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where he received a silver medal. He began exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1905, where the interior of his painting of an elderly peasant woman, La Vecchia, is very similar to the one in Mère et Enfant – the most notable feature being the patterned jacquard coverlet topped with a white pillow that appears behind both women. In fact, the interior compositions of both paintings are similar with several still life elements, bowls and teapots in porcelain and copper seen atop the corner of a table in the back, meticulously rendered – one of Miller's signature features from his earliest to his late works.

It is not clear where Miller painted Mère et Enfant, as the young woman's cap and costume appears to be Breton, while the interior, with its wall-bed and well-padded coverlet, points to that found in a peasant home in Marken, Holland, for example, although such lit-clos were not unknown in northern France. Miller painted in both Brittany and Holland in his early years in Europe. The size of Mère et Enfant, suggests it was painted in his Paris studio, where he may have combined elements of dress and interiors from both his Breton and Dutch trips in the same painting. Miller was known to engage in this kind of artistic license throughout his career, inventing compositions with elements chosen for their aesthetic properties over reportorial ones.

An almost identical interior appears in Miller's La Vecchia, which he exhibited in the 1905 Venice Biennale. A number of other canvases of peasant women or children that he exhibited around the same period were sometimes of Dutch subjects. (For example, he exhibited A Dutch Girl at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, Portland, Oregon in 1905.) While details of Miller's painting trips to Holland are spotty, we learn from a 1903 letter from Miller's friend and colleague Frederick Frieseke to his wife, that Miller "is taking a class up to Holland..." that summer. Miller's sister, Viola Longmire, noted that Miller had also taught in Veere (no dates given), and the 1949 edition of The National Cyclopedia of American Biography notes a painting by Miller titled Dutch Woman of Rysoord.

Mère et Enfant is a reworking of Dutch painter Jozef Israels' The Cottage Madonna, 1867, purchased by an American collector in 1902, and now in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Miller flattens the space considerably, eliminates objects and brings the mother and child very close to the picture plane. Israels, who exhibited six paintings at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, was a well-known and popular painter, who would easily have been familiar to Miller.