Like many of his American contemporaries, Richard E. Miller studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and spent time at Giverny, the site of Claude Monet’s country home. Sunlight is one of a group of paintings depicting scenes of women outdoors or in sunlit interiors. The light filling the room is diffused evenly over the models, objects, and windows, creating a variety of decorative patterns. In his interest in painting as nonnarrative and his technical experiments with thickly applied color over thin layers of pigment, Miller is not dissimilar to one of his many influences, Édouard Vuillard.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Friends of American Art Yearbook, 1914–1915, 5th ed. (1916), 23, 92, 94, 183.
George William Eggers, Handbook of Sculpture, Architecture, Paintings, and Drawings: Part II: Paintings and Drawings, vol. 2 (Art Institute of Chicago, 1920), 44, cat. 405, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015036764952.
Robert B. Harshe, Handbook of Sculpture, Architecture and Paintings: Part II: Paintings, vol. 2 (Art Institute of Chicago, 1922), 46, cat. 405, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x006053578.
Catalogue of the Exhibition of Forty Paintings Presented to the Art Institute of Chicago by the Friends of American Art, exh. cat. (Milwaukee Art Institute, 1925), n.p., cat. 27.
Judith A. Barter, et al., The Age of American Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Art Institute of Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago, 2011), 130, cat. 74 (ill.).
Milwaukee Art Institute, Exhibition of Forty Paintings Presented to the Art Institute of Chicago by the Friends of American Art, Mar. 1–29, 1925, cat. 27.
Champaign, University of Illinois, Architecture Building Gallery, American Paintings from the Permanent Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dec. 3–29, 1939, no cat.
MI, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Civic Theater, Jan.–Feb. 1945, no cat.
St. Louis Artists’ Guild, Richard E. Miller Memorial Exhibtion, –Feb. 6, 1957, no cat.
St. Louis Art Museum, Richard E. Miller, American Impressionist, Sept. 9–Oct. 26, 1986, no cat.
The artist, New York; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, Dec. 1915.
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