The Grandmother Tree, near Middletown, Long Island

The English émigré Miller was one of the most prolific watercolorists in America prior to the foundation of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors in 1866 and his work was frequently engrave din popular periodicals. Although Miller’s style is consistent with contemporary English fashion in watercolor, it has perhaps the strongest affinity with the vision and technique of the eighteenth-century artist Paul Sandby. Miller shared with Sandby a taste for compositions with umbrageous trees in the foreground sheltering lanes and paths curving into the background, in the mode of the Norwich School of English landscape painting. The bucolic scene represented here was located in present-day Astoria, Queens.

Credit: Gift of Mrs. A. M. Miller, 1893