Richard Edward Miller

A painting that had not been seen for years came up for sale at Christie's in New York in 1997. Ellen Lee, a curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, had traced it to an entry in Richard E. Miller's own scrapbook, and with the collectors Jane and Andrew Paine bidding, it sold for just over a million dollars and entered the museum. Afternoon Tea, painted in 1910, shows women in a sunlit, flower-filled setting, with the strong colour and Japanese-inspired design Miller was known for.

Miller was born in St. Louis in 1875 and studied there before going to Paris in 1898 to train at the Académie Julian, a private art school. From about 1906 he spent summers in Giverny, the village where Claude Monet lived and an American art colony grew. With his friends Frederick Frieseke and Lawton Parker he exhibited in New York in 1910 as the Giverny Group, painters of women at rest in sun-drenched gardens and interiors. He was a sought-after teacher, and students followed him to Giverny. One of them, Harriette Adams, became his wife.

He won a silver medal at the Paris Salon in 1904 and was made a knight of the French Legion of Honour. In 1917 he settled in Provincetown, the art colony at the tip of Cape Cod, and he died in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1943.