Very Large painting Full length portrait of a young lady with a posy of flowers

  

A very engaging portrait of a pretty young girl holding a posy of flowers. On a large scale, this impressive piece would add grandeur to a hall or drawing room. Portrait of a young girl with a posy of flowers. Signed to old label to the reverse. 35½ x 27½ inches excluding the frame.

45½ x 37½ inches with the frame. Presented in a very attractive Watts style frame. William Miller was primarily a society portrait painter but also known as an antiquarian horological collector. He was born in Florence on 24th April 1851 as third son of six, plus two daughters, of John and Harriet Miller (née Edwards).

John was usually recorded as an artist himself, including on his marriage at St Pancras, London, on 22nd October 1846 and at his children's baptisms, but was really a gentleman of private means who was living in Europe for some years when his second and third sons were born. The second was John Douglas Miller, apparently born early in 1850 in Paris, who in 1871 was a co-pupil and just ahead of William in the Royal Academy Schools: he became a well-known mezzotint engraver and protégé of George Richmond.

For his last 23 years there to retirement in 1913 the ordering and printing of its General Catalogue was entirely under his control. He died suddenly in the Museum the following year while showing his daughter a newly opened gallery there. William Miller began exhibiting at the RA in 1873, with A Study and A Girl's Head, but mostly portraits and a few more studies and figure subjects following. He also exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy (1891 only), the Grosvenor Gallery, the New Gallery, at Birmingham and at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, but again only up to 1909 at any of them.

Thereafter his practice, which included some commissioned copy portraits for Oxford and Cambridge colleges, ran on privately to 1929.