Richard Edward Miller

Couck Art Gallery, Brussels

Acquired from the above by the present owner

We are grateful to Marie Louise Kane for preparing the following essay:

Lady with Mirror (original title unknown) contains all of the most characteristic elements of Richard E. Miller's painting over his successful, multi-decade career: a comely woman seated in a private corner of her home, elegantly dressed, musing, all painted with an active, assured brush.

In the 19-teens, in the full flush of Miller's Paris years, his canvases, protyopes of this one, pulsed with energetic brushwork, bright light, and strong color, garnering praise by critics, who also made special note of his facility in conveying texture, whether polished wood, delicate porcelain, gleaming metal, dry tulle, silky satins or soft female flesh.

In Lady with Mirror, Miller deftly fuses these elements albeit with noticeable changes that reflect his artistic growth and a subtle transition to the slightly more modern aesthetic of his late work. No doubt painted in his Provincetown studio, perhaps in the mid 1930s, Lady with Mirror is stylistically more integrated than earlier works in which the porcelain-doll rendering of his models contrasted sharply to the impressionistic handling of their surroundings. Here the figure, her dress, and her surroundings are all handled with the same exuberant brush, to which her calm demeanor is a foil. Miller's play of curves (the frame of the small loveseat, the tabletop on the right, the half-circular skirt) and straight lines (the window muntins, the edge of a wall, a picture frame, table legs), is a classic compositional strategy of his. The loveseat, sometimes a dark velour as in this painting, crops up in several of Miller's works from 1929 to1940: String Artist, exhibited at Grand Central Art Galleries in New York in 1929, Miss V in Green, exhibited at GCAG in 1937, Sheila, ca. 1939, and In the Boudoir, exhibited at GCAG in 1940, to name a few. Miller's palette darkens in these years, although his interest in light, which has always been strong, now periodically, as in Lady with Mirror and Young Woman Seated on a Sofa (Bonham's, December 2, 2009, Lot 37), dematerializes his subjects and their surroundings to striking visual effect. Miller always retained the strong draughtsmanship of his early training, even while showing signs of, as in Lady with Mirror, the more modern aesthetic that surrounded him late in his career.