Random Inspiration: Richard E. Miller Part V

It may come as a surprise to many that Miller’s signature works were not executed in oil paint. For his characteristic “dabs, broad strokes, scraped patches, dry swags and floating flecks of color,”¹¹ the artist instead relied upon a contemporary incarnation of a medium which pre-dated oils: distemper.

Distemper coloring is an ancient water-based medium which is most often associated with mural painting; fresco painters called it secco (Italian for “dry”), and it was used for refining or retouching wall paintings. It consists of dry pigment (almost all those suitable for oil can be used in distemper), mixed with whitingª (ie. calcium carbonate - chalk, limestone, marble) for added body, and then bound with animal gluten (eg. rabbit-skin glue). Distemper dries quickly, though at values lighter than when it was first applied, and when complete, resembles pastels in both color and chalkiness. In the 19th Century, distemper was considered only suitable for home decorating or for theatrical backdrop painting and it was deemed by most as a rather crude and cheap paint, not to be used in fine art painting.

Why Miller chose to work in distemper is uncertain. Its immediacy of use may have been beneficial in capturing, opaquely, the fleeting light effects observable when painting in sunrooms or gardens, and its inexpensiveness may have also been appealing to a young family man. He was far from the only person of the period employing that vehicle, and it is also quite likely that Miller had been inspired to work in distemper because of the works in that medium by such fellow-artists as Nabbi painter Édouard Vuillard, for whose earlier, avant-garde work Miller would have been familiar. Vuillard, nor Miller, applied the distemper in the thin and smooth manner prescribed by fresco painters, and though Miller may have enjoyed the results attained in the medium, he used distemper with a pronounced unconcern for its permanency - to this end, Norman Rockwell once quoted Miller as having declared, “Let the next generation paint its own pictures!”¹²

Wallace Thompson, the Paris correspondent for the Fine Arts Journal, gave this first-hand account of Richard Miller’s method in 1912:

For sketching in he uses plain distemper [ie. dry pigments mixed with glue or size], made fluid with water, and of the general tone of the picture, which in his usual work is almost invariably green. Upon this he builds his painting, using not ground colors and oil but a modern ‘tempera’ whose vehicle is a special emulsion which dries rapidly and permanently, obviating the chemical difficulties of oil paints and yet producing the effect of oils. This is no secret process but a well known product of a German manufacture, which is mentioned to emphasize one distinctly modern phase of Miller’s attitude toward his art, his businesslike adaptation of all conveniences of invention, without hesitancy, and in calm defiance … of all artistic tradition. Like most moderns, Miller has dropped the three paintings of flesh tints, even, and after his first drawing with distemper paints directly, afterwards merely ‘breathing in’ onthe finished work, through many sittings, thickening his paint here and there, piling up his high lights and softening his edges but all upon the perfectly dry surface, and in the end leaving it finished as his last brush-stroke touched it, without the necessity of false values calculating on a final ‘glazing.’ His result is not ‘mud,’ as might have been expected, but a clear vividness of color and atmosphere which are chief characteristics by which he is known.¹³

ªNot all artists working in distemper added whiting to their pigments; some used dry pigment with glue alone, as is likely the case with Richard Edward Miller.