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Description: | 91.0 x 101.0 s.d. b.l. "Josephine Miller 1936" CRE MILLER, Josephine Halswell; (Scottish; 1890-1975) This is a relatively rare example of the oil technique of Josephine Halswell Miller, who also worked as an etcher. Born in 1890, the artist benefited from the instruction of two of the great first generation teachers at Glasgow School of Art, namely Maurice Greiffenhagen and Anning Bell. After her initial training (1909-14), she studied in Paris and subsequently with Walter R. Sickert, whose rich and expressive style, at that time still in evolution, she seems manifestly to have resisted in her own work.
In 1919, Josephine joined her husband, A.E. Halswell Miller, as a member of Glasgow School of Art's teaching staff. She travelled widely in Europe in subsequent years, and produced many portraits and landscapes, together with the occasional Classical subject. Nevertheless, she remained an artist who demonstrated little urge to attack exotic, recondite or bravura themes in her work, and was happy to persist with her Scottish views, studio pieces and still lifes. Her destruction of many of her works - hence their relative scarcity - testifies to a wholly unjustified lack of conviction regarding the merits of her finished pieces.
'Memories of the Sea' was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1937, and is a product of the artist's residence at Hailes Cottage in Kingsknowe near Edinburgh. Halswell Miller's facility is seen at its most attractive in this carefully composed marine melange - the slightly tilted table with its spilling of pastel drapes in colours often present in the Greiffenhagen palette; the flatback fisher figurine, perhaps of Prestonpans ware; the concertina book plate with its reference to Jean Francois de Galaup, Comte de La Perouse, whose worldwide voyages between 1785 and 1788 confirmed him as a variant Captain Cook; the carefully delineated shells of the Dutch still-life tradition. The slightly arid painting technique, dry almost to sparseness in certain passages, is nevertheless redeemed by that solid facility of line which was, during Halswell Miller's Lehrjahren, the underprop of the Glasgow training programme. On occasion, her assured underdrawing bursts through the thin epidermis of concealing paint - a surprisingly firm armature which confirms the skill of this somewhat reticent artist.
Text © Marion Lawson, History of Art Department, University of Glasgow 1984. | License: | http://www.hmag.gla.ac.uk/spirit/rights/ | Publisher: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Rights holder: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Subjects: | STILL LIFE : INTERIOR : BOAT : SEA : CAMPUS : CAMPUS : | Source: | Hunterian Museum | Creator: | Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow | Identifier: | http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/... | Language: | en-GB | Go to resource |
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