PROVENANCE
Private Collection
Important American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Christie's New York, November 30, 1999, lot 64
Private Collection, Nova Scotia

The work of American Impressionist Richard E. Miller speaks to the enduring art historical legacy of the north of France. Titans such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis were seduced by the region's famously rich light and rustic beauty. While locations in Britanny such as St. Malo, Dinan and Concarneau are noted painting locales, Normandy’s Giverny is undoubtedly more famous still. Synonymous with Claude Monet and his iconic images of waterlilies, Giverny became the residence of several American Impressionist artists, eventually known as The Giverny Group. Miller was a member of the “second wave” of artists who were drawn to the Giverny Colony, and the influences he accrued there, are eminently present in Bathers. The remarkably romantic tone is amplified by loose and rich applications of colour and a palpably textural surface. While the intimate observation of the figures suggests Edgar Degas’s own bathers, it is the palette of the distant water that contains the clearest presence of Monet and his pools at Giverny. Adding to what he had learned previously at Paris’ Academie Julien, Miller’s experiences in Normandy allowed him to provide his own indelible contribution to American art history.

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