Object Details
Object Essay
Although often compelled to paint portraits and illustrate books and weekly papers to make a living, William Rickarby Miller was a landscape painter by temperament. Born in England (Staindrop, County Durham), he was trained by his father, an animal and landscape painter, and became adept in watercolors. Miller emigrated to America during the winter of 1844–1845, lived first in Buffalo, New York, and then established himself permanently in New York City by 1848.
Miller painted views in and around the city, but he frequently turned to upstate New York for his subjects. For the last twenty years of his life, he worked on a project to publish American landscape scenes, which he called “A Thousand Gems.”1See Koke, 2: 342; and Zellman, 1: 183. He never completed this immense undertaking, but many of his landscape sketches for it have survived. As a rule, they are pen-and-ink drawings, sometimes with wash added. (Many were later used as the basis for oil paintings.) There is reason to believe that Miller intended watercolor sketches for the same project.2Koke, 2: 343ff. The New-York Historical Society owned many of these drawings. River Walk is derived from his watercolor of 1881 entitled New York from Hoboken, N.J., in the New-York Historical Society.3Ibid., 2: 364, no. 1945, illus. on p. 365. They are identical compositions except that the watercolor lacks the strolling figures on the shore. River Walk, on the shore below Castle Point, still exists today.
It is interesting to compare River Walk to the two roughly contemporary paintings of leisure on the shore, also in the Collection, by Alfred T. Bricher (Acc. No. 64.14) and Granville Perkins (Acc. No. 62.5). Miller’s scene is more bucolic than Perkins’s rather busy promenade and more middle-class than Bricher’s elegant strand. The landscape is breezy and fresh, and the strolling families are narrative in spirit, observing boats or commenting on the boatmen at work. A gem indeed, Miller’s River Walk seems not at all nostalgic, but perfectly attuned to the pleasures of the parklike landscape that fringed the densely populated city.
William Kloss
Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.