Kenneth Hayes Miller Figurative Paintings
American, 1876-1952
Kenneth Hayes Miller is best known as a teacher and founder of what became known as the Fourteenth Street school. While paintings of middle-class female shoppers from his mature period are his best known, he had a long, distinctly different early phase.
Miller was born in the utopian community of Oneida and studied art in the 1890s at the New York School of Art with William Merritt Chase and later at the Art Students League with several prominent, traditional, mural painters, such as Kenyon Cox and H. Siddons Mowbray. Works from his first sustained period of painting are mostly of nude figures set in idealized, romantic landscapes. These poetic, somewhat symbolic paintings, similar to the art of his contemporaries Arthur B. Davies and Bryson Burroughs, were largely inspired by Albert Pinkham Ryder, an artist Miller admired and befriended.
After World War I Miller turned to realism. Like the Ash Can school painters, he became a delineator of the ordinary pedestrian, but unlike them was fascinated with the human figure as a vehicle for plastic interpretation. His painting style became less atmospheric as he brightened his palette and delineated objects more clearly. His depictions of robust female shoppers in groups, pairs, or alone established his reputation in the 1920s and 1930s. He also continued to paint the female nude but placed the figure in interior settings and rendered it as a more sensuous and real body than he had in his earlier idealized works. Throughout his career Miller was also interested in etching and sometimes repeated his painted images in prints.
After a trip to Europe in 1900 Miller began a long teaching career, first at the Chase School of Art, and when that dissolved, in 1911 he began his more than forty-year association with the Art Students League. His numerous students there included Peggy Bacon, George Bellows, Isabel Bishop, Arnold Blanch, Patrick Henry Bruce, Minna Citron, John McCrady, Thelma Cudlipp, Horace Day, Dorothy Eaton, Arnold Friedman, Lloyd Goodrich, Josephine Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Emma Fordyce MacRae, Edward Middleton Manigault, Reginald Marsh, George L.K. Morris, Walter Tandy Murch, Louise Emerson Ronnebeck, George Tooker, Russel Wright, Albert Pels, William C. Palmer, Molly Luce, and Helen Winslow Durkee. In his teaching Miller stressed the importance of learning from the art of the past, in particular that of the Renaissance. He was also instrumental in reviving old-master techniques such as casein and tempera painting.to
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Artist: Kenneth Hayes Miller
Portrait of a Woman lost in Thought
By Kenneth Hayes Miller
Located in Miami, FL
Signed and dated 1924 upper right
Simplified forms, geometricized volumes and restricted color palette characterizes this work.
Zabriskie Gallery Label on verso
Original period frame
Kenneth Hayes Miller taught at the Art Students League from 1911 until 1951. Some of his students were: Reginald Marsh, George Bellows, George Tooker, Rockwell Kent, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Patrick Henry Bruce
Category
1920s American Impressionist Kenneth Hayes Miller Figurative Paintings
Materials
Oil
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Kenneth Hayes Miller figurative paintings for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Kenneth Hayes Miller figurative paintings available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Kenneth Hayes Miller in oil paint, paint, board and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the Impressionist style. Not every interior allows for large Kenneth Hayes Miller figurative paintings, so small editions measuring 17 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Herman Hyneman, Kevin Weckbach, and Johann Berthelsen. Kenneth Hayes Miller figurative paintings prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $9,500 and tops out at $20,000, while the average work can sell for $14,750.