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The Life and Work of Godfrey Clive Miller, 1893 - 1964
PhD thesis by Ann Wookey
Chapter 1. The years of innocence and early manhood: New Zealand and Australia, 1893 - 1929 (link to notes)
New Zealand, 1893-1918
Godfrey Miller claimed in his forty fifth year to have been born in a village below a mountain 1. The claim should be taken to be poetic licence for he was born in Wellington in New Zealand on 20 August 1893 2. Thomas Tripney Miller, his Scottish father, was Accountant for the Bank of Australasia’s major branch there at the time. The following year T T Miller was appointed Manager at Patea and a year later, in 1895, transferred to nearby Hawera 3. And so began what became for his second son, Godfrey, a wandering life. These places are all in the Taranaki district which is a pastoral region on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand over which dominated the emergent volcano Mt Egmont. This almost purely conical peak is snow-covered for most of the year and is believed to have been active ‘as recently as eighty years ago’ 4. Hence Miller’s allusion in later life to his birthplace. His very early childhood years were visually transfixed by its form and this was to prove significant in later life. The family saw the mountain erupt and this impressed itself indelibly upon the small boy - Miller later recalled driving in a phaeton with his father, step-mother and brother to see Mt Egmont which looked as if ‘a giant had stepped on it’ 5, a most apt description for a mountain with its peak blown away. In September 1901 his father took up an appointment in Palmerston North on the North Island. Finally in March 1908 he was appointed to a large branch at Dunedin in the Otago province on the South Island. Dunedin was quite an environmental change for the family. As well as being an agricultural area, it was an important manufacturing and business centre, which had begun as the centre for the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s. Significantly for his son the city enjoyed an active cultural life, especially in the visual arts.
Thomas Miller’s professional position in town would have opened many Dunedin doors to him and his family. Eliza Jane, his wife by this time, carried significant social status of her own. She had been born in 1865 as the first of ten children, all first generation New Zealanders, to the founding New Zealand businessman and leading politician, John Duthie. Consequently in Wellington after 1880 and later the Hutt Valley, the Duthie family enjoyed a privileged life style that was undoubtedly shared on the occasional visit by Duthie’s grandchildren. Eliza Jane was Thomas Tripney’s second wife and Godfrey’s step-mother. His mother had been Isabella, John Duthie’s second child who was born March 1867. Isabella, having born three children, died from tuberculosis in November 1896 when Miller was a little over three. Thomas Tripney remarried her sister Eliza Jane probably within two years. From this second marriage a further four children were sired. One of these, Lewis, would become a significant crutch in his half-brother Godfrey’s adult life 6.
We do not know precisely where Godfrey was educated prior to 1908 but it was likely to be schools in the towns where his father worked; for instance, he may have spent his early high school years at Palmerston North Boys’ High School, which his older brother Malcolm attended. That he grew up in these towns is suggested by his later remarks that there were no paintings in the “little towns” of his youth 7. Miller was admitted to the Otago Boys’ High School in Dunedin in May 1908 aged 14 years and 9 months on a Junior Scholarship. He remained there until his schooling was completed in September 1910. Although the family resided in Dunedin he boarded in the school hostel, The Rectory. The subjects the young Miller studied at high school were English, Mathematics, Latin and Science. He may also have attended art classes at the Otago School of Art and Design for the first time, for such a facility operated over a number of years between the two institutions. Such an opportunity must have been welcomed. Miller later attested to collecting and studying reproductions from Turner’s Liber Studorium as a youth in New Zealand, and there was the memory of his mother Isabella’s painting to spur his interest as well 8. It is possible, therefore, that Miller while still a secondary student came to know Alfred Henry O’Keeffe, the painter whom he later acknowledged as his earliest teacher.
On finishing secondary school at the age of seventeen in 1910 and before his decision to become an artist, Miller was trained in a formal apprenticeship as an architect. He began night classes at the Otago School of Art and Design in Dunedin and in July 1911 he passed two of the British Science and Art Examinations held that year in New Zealand 9. Freehand Drawing was one and Building and Construction and Drawing the other. Doubtless these were part of the technical education requirements that often accompany formal apprenticeships. Whether Miller was in an apprenticeship in 1911 is not known. It is likely, however, since later in life he recalled leaving “Montecillo” [the family home until 1914] each day by motorcycle for his apprenticeship [a day’s work and then evening class] 10. He also stated later that he first trained as a carpenter and that it was from there that his interest in architecture grew 11. Henshaw records Miller as being employed by a Dunedin building firm in 1912 and quotes him ‘making boxing for concrete, sawed, dug holes’ for the Dunedin YMCA 12. Practical experience of this type, as with the Science and Art examinations, was possibly part of his apprenticeship. A question remains, however, about when his apprenticeship was begun. At the time he joined the war effort in October 1914 he was an apprentice draughtsman with Salmond and Vanes of Dunedin 13. Miller noted later in 1923 that he had been apprenticed to and worked with an English-trained architect [presumably attached to this firm] 14.
Miller’s life changed forever when he enlisted in New Zealand’s fledgling World War I overseas force. The circumstances of his joining up are likely to have been, as for so many other young men at that time, the strongly felt patriotism for the British Empire then held in the Dominions. Before enlisting for overseas service he belonged to the Territorial Force’s Divisional Signal Company in the New Zealand Engineers 15. T J Arnold’s centennial history of Miller’s old school records ‘an intense patriotism and enthusiasm for things military’ in this period. The Otago Boys’ High School had been presented with Colours for its Battalion by Lord Kitchener of Khartoum in 1910 16. Miller’s participation in the cadet battalion is quite likely since he joined the home front New Zealand Territorial Force after leaving school.
Miller was 21 years old in October 1914, of slightish build with a fair complexion, fair hair and blue eyes. An early sweetheart, Lyla Melles, recalled the young man at this time:
I think Godfrey - Clive - was 18 when we fell in love.
He was wonderful fun to be with. He loved architecture and he used to bring me drawings of buildings and people.
They were marvellous, highly creative. But he was so modest, I doubt anyone else saw them 17.
He is described by Henshaw as an ‘athletic and sensitive boy, discovering Ruskin, Shakespeare and Francis Thompson’ 18. However, Miller recalled that he did not see paintings of any quality until he reached twenty 19. Whether he included Dunedin in the sweep of this statement is open to conjecture. While the city hosted an important New Zealand art school and a most active art group [the Otago Art Society], the public gallery’s holdings in 1913 were typical of a provincial institution. Founded on acquisitions from the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of 1890, the collection had been built by the purchase, donation and loan of mainly late nineteenth century British academicians and a few painters working in New Zealand 20.
Dunedin was noted for its strong Presbyterian tradition. Among its earliest settlers had been members of the lay association of the Free Church of Scotland who had migrated with Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s second New Zealand Company 21. During the late nineteenth century these and other settlers’ inclinations led to the founding of institutions and societies that ensured the city a rich intellectual and cultural heritage. Some of these facilities such as the art school, and perhaps the art society and the city’s gallery, were later of direct practical significance for Miller’s artistic development. Again, the presence of the University of Otago may have inspired the young man’s intellectual affections and ambitions. The Dunedin-born illustrator Peter McIntyre, who was seventeen years younger than Miller, recorded living there during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Although his book The Painted Years pictures the city and surrounding countryside as a growing boy’s paradise, it conveys well a sense of the prevailing Scottish-grounded provincialism and of the patriotism felt at the outbreak of war 22. Miller himself later talked of the city as full of “heavy Scottish sternness” 23. In addition, his step-mother was both a devout Presbyterian and a member of the Salvation Army. As an exuberant if modest youth this upbringing could readily have been found puritanical and wowserish.
The young man was attested into the First New Zealand Expeditionary Force at Trentham near Wellington on 25 October 1914 and served overseas with the Divisional Signals Company of the New Zealand Engineers. The company sailed from New Zealand on 14 December 1914 on a journey to the Middle East that took Miller through Melbourne for the first time. The soldiers arrived in Egypt late in January 1915 24, where those destined for Gallipoli were first trained at Zeitoun Camp in the desert on the outskirts of Heliopolis, near Cairo 25. As a young man involved with architecture and the other arts Miller would surely have found much of interest in the history and archeological remains of the area. Heliopolis had been a major centre in Ancient Egypt and was of theological importance for the Osiris myth central to Egyptian religious beliefs and practices 26. Miller’s subsequent life interest in Egyptian culture stemmed from this soldiering experience 27. His army record does not state when he arrived at Gallipoli but he was probably there from the beginning of the campaign on the 25 April 1915. He was a flag signaller and on 7 August, just over three months later and six days after promotion from Sapper to Lance Corporal, he took a bullet wound to the front of his upper right arm 28. Since his job probably involved him being close to enemy lines operating directly under the big guns, the young soldier was lucky to remain alive and uninjured for so long. The conditions on the Peninsular by August were appalling. At the beginning of that month a major Allied offensive was launched against a prepared Turkish enemy with dreadful losses on both sides. Over the 6 and 7 of August the New Zealand Mounted Rifles recaptured Old No 3 Post and took Table Top and Beauchop’s Hill. The Australians were engaged at Lone Pine over the same two days. Miller at the time of his injury may well have been involved with the latter. Wherever he was, he would have been immersed in what must have seemed to a sensitive nature scenes of hell on earth, with dead and wounded mounting up in trenches or lying unattended on the battlefields for hours 29. Miller was admitted to the First Australian Casualty Clearing Station on the day he was shot [this supports the contention that he was assisting the Australians at Lone Pine at the time]. By the end of October he was back in New Zealand although still hospitalised. He remained at a military hospital until 28 February 1916 and then moved to live with his father on extended sick leave until 15 May 1916. The wound to his arm caused a degree of paralysis and during May 1916 he was assessed as medically unfit for further service and discharged from the New Zealand Army. The pension level he was awarded suggests a significant handicap from the wound 30.
Two aspects of Miller’s Army record, his role at Gallipoli and the amount of time spent at the front line, carry particular significance in relation to questions about his subsequent health and personality. It is very likely that Miller’s wound caused ongoing health problems throughout his life. Apart from known physical disabilities, there is also a pattern of psychological disturbance that emerges through his letters and in the opinions and stories of acquaintances. It cannot be discounted, therefore, that he suffered general trauma and more specifically shell-shock as the result of his Gallipoli experiences 31. The medical understanding, even in 1916, was that vulnerability to shell shock increased according to lack of military experience, increased lengths of time exposed to shell fire or under fire and for ‘individuals of a neuropathic or psychopathic predisposition or of a nervous or timorous disposition’ 32. Miller’s personality and experience at the time of his injury may well have matched all three conditions. Certainly, later acquaintances believed that Miller suffered neurasthenia, a long-term nervous disability quite likely the aftermath of shell-shock 33. A final comment about the effects of his going to war comes from Lyla Melles:
Then he went to war . . .
For a while his letters were, well, what one would expect. After he was wounded, they changed, soured.
Then he came home. His right arm was very bad . . .
He was dreadfully embittered. He kept saying that no one should enjoy himself, that people had no right to go to the theatres or live normally while there was such killing and destruction.
. . . Clive [Godfrey] seemed more and more a stranger 34.
An experience of this nature and its associated trauma would readily account for Miller’s withdrawal and that recluse side of his nature, which is recorded as so evident from the 1930s and most likely was present earlier. A distrust, sometimes an active dislike, of one’s fellows is not unknown with withdrawals of this kind 35. Miller’s correspondence carries such undertones at times. However, a complementary love of humanity is also evident. Gallipoli left a mark on him forever. Consequently, his paintings frequently espouse mankind’s attainment of peace while they speak also of withdrawal and reclusion.
Miller’s difficulties continued after arrival home in New Zealand. During convalescence over 1916 a return to his earlier interests in literature and poetry provided some compensation, and both became life-long loves. Of particular significance for him was Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven read for the first time at “Glenesk” which was the new family house acquired just before he went to war 36. Despite the poor state of his health and physical capacity for the nine months following his return Miller achieved registration with the New Zealand Institute of Architects on 25 July 1917. For this he needed to have been ‘a pupil or apprentice for a period of not less than three years to an architectural practitioner’ 37. Because he was not discharged from the army until May 1916 the date of this registration supports the contention that Miller was articled and served an apprenticeship in architecture for at least two years before embarking for the war. His apprenticeship through to registration may have been with Salmond and Vanes of Dunedin, the firm recorded for 1914 in Miller’s army record. There is a possibility, however, that the English-trained architect who trained him changed architectural practices in about 1917. This would explain why Miller later named the Dunedin architectural firm of Mason & Wales as his employer during this decade 38. This was most likely to have been after his registration in July 1917 with the New Zealand Institute of Architects and before 1918 when he moved to Australia. During this time he worked on the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva 39.
This was not a happy time for the young architect. In addition to his own troubles, his father, who had been experiencing ill-health for some years, retired from the Bank of Australasia in 1918. This placed further pressures on the family home. According to a statement from the artist in 1938, he took leave from an architectural office in the south of New Zealand to visit his father who was undergoing an operation in Auckland - probably late in 1917. The journey was a significant one for Miller. A sharp “What” from his boss when the trip was suggested crystallised his discontent and was the catalyst in his decision to become an artist. After seeing his father he ‘fled into the hills’ rather than immediately returning to his position. It was then, Miller implied, that he turned to art: ‘[I soon after] started on a task which I now see was more colossal and intricate than jobs undertaken by Napoleon or any Columbus’ 40. Miller had been encouraged to paint in Dunedin by Alfred Henry O’Keeffe. It is not known how he came to know O’Keeffe. As noted, it is possible that he knew him when a secondary student at the Otago Boys’ High School and during the early years of his apprenticeship 41. Certainly by 1917 Miller can be expected to have moved in New Zealand art circles as he was to do through most of his adult life. He could thus have known O’Keeffe through his artistic friends. Some support for his connections with New Zealand art circles is obtained through his exhibition of a prizewinning “Head from Life or Antique”, probably a drawing, with the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington in 1918 42. However, since Miller had enrolled by then at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, it is not clear whether he himself submitted the piece or whether it was submitted on his behalf 43. Later Miller most certainly lacked the confidence to exhibit.
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Australia, 1918-1929
Miller enrolled in the Drawing School at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne for 1918, aged twenty-five 44. A quite separate painting school was also attached to the National Gallery and both were located within the Public Library of Victoria and the State Museum in an extensive domed complex with its main entrance on Swanston Street. Tonal realism had dominated late nineteenth century Royal Academy exhibitions in London and the Paris salons and Lindsay Bernard Hall made this style the school’s focus when appointed its Head in 1892. As Hall explains:
There is nothing new in the system - which is based in the first instance on drawing, with good outline, anatomy and therefore form. [The black and white of colour] wherein I would class effect, or the massing and grouping of light and shade, and lastly colour, as the subtle charm that should pervade the whole 45.
William Beckwith McInnes had been appointed temporarily as Drawing Master on the death of Frederick McCubbin in 1917. McInnes was an academic traditionalist whom the students admired for the ‘charm and sensitiveness’ of his landscape painting 46. As a drawing student Miller would have been permitted to take classes, probably under McInnes, only in drawing from the antique. Under Hall’s leadership, an emphasis on outline and anatomy in the form of his drawings is to be expected. Miller would not have participated in life drawing or painting sessions but probably received instruction in art history and art appreciation and was permitted to borrow from the school’s lending library after his first term’s attendance 47. Importantly, he also had access to the public library’s books. Its art instruction manuals in particular were read by the aspiring young painter during his years in Melbourne.
Evidence of Miller’s movements and interests over the following ten years until he left for London in 1929 is slight, with just a few letters dated between 1922 and 1924 the main source. He is believed to have spent the major part of those years in Australia but it was to be by no means a settled existence 48. Because of ill-health during 1919 he travelled by sea in the Far East as far north as Japan and while in Hong Kong took an excursion into mainland China to Canton 49. This trip was an important inspirational source to the young man - it began his lifelong interest in Chinese thought and culture. After his return to Australia in September 1919 all traces of Miller are lost for nine months until July 1920 when his address was in East Melbourne. The following year he moved into a house in Kew with a fellow art school student, Guthrie Grant, and his sister Nancy. Miller maintained this Melbourne address until mid-1923. However, by May 1922 he lived mostly in a one-roomed cottage in the bush at Warrandyte about twenty kilometres outside the city centre 50. Despite continuing physical discomfort as a result of the war injury to his arm he was well occupied at Warrandyte. As with his last New Zealand days, architecture had been laid aside and he was instead ‘totally rapped up with the charms of the sister art of landscape painting’ as an early letter tells 51. Miller continued with reading interests from previous years such as John Ruskin. However, his general interest by now lay more clearly with literature that can loosely be termed symbolist in nature. The “inward eye” of William Blake intrigued him although he felt that he did not understand the poet. He also read Thomas Carlyle whom he quoted, ‘“The eye sees what the brain brings the means of seeing”’. The phrase was found ‘curious and vague’ and caused him to be rather afraid to reread that author 52. Other writers and books mentioned in the early 1920s were William Shakespeare, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Maurice Maeterlinck, the alchemic novel The Quest of the Absolute by Honoré Balzac, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Robert Browning, who always remained a favourite 53. This reading by Miller reflects a wider Australasian cultural interest at this time in the Romantic and Symbolist traditions 54.
Early in 1923 the young artist travelled from Warrandyte to Sydney en route to Auckland to live for some months with his sick father in the Niatapu Ranges. A few months afterwards Thomas Miller crossed the Tasman for treatment at a sanatorium outside Sydney and perhaps to live permanently nearby 55. Miller made further trips from Warrandyte to Sydney to see him over the next twelve months. He also re-enrolled at the National Gallery’s Drawing School for late-1923 and early-1924 56. Again, he was unlikely to have received tuition in painting at this time. By mid-1924 Miller was once more living in the bush at Warrandyte although he continued to call on the Grants [also at Warrandyte by then] ‘to break the fast of my hermitage’. In addition there were visits still to the city for events such as Dame Nellie Melba and her Italian opera company performing La Bohème. He believed by now, aged thirty, that the pursuit of monetary success was an empty gesture, and he was also intellectually opposed to the “logical world”, a term which he appears to have applied to business activity because it lacked imagination and pleasure in life. Twelve months previously he had admitted to being unsuited to gentlemanly callings such as architecture because of his “larrikin” nature although his new “profession” [painting] had ‘steadied my adventurous spirit’ 57. The Warrandyte sojourn may not have lasted for a Godfrey Miller lived in West Melbourne over 1924 and 1925 58. Perhaps life in the bush was too isolated. In the mid-1920s, then, Miller emerges as a man who still liked to keep his own company but who equally enjoyed the company of his fellows and cultural events. There was probably a sense of fun about him as Melles had observed in 1914. There was maybe even the rough rudeness and outspokenness of the provincial man, although continuing ill-health could well have triggered any curtness displayed [a capacity suggested by the chastisement, ‘“Well your manners have not improved”’, earned during his brief return in 1932]. In the main his activities at the time were those of a cultured young man who had little need to occupy himself with more everyday activities such as earning an income 59.
Who were Miller’s artist friends and acquaintances during these years? On his own admission he had arrived in the city a complete stranger 60. Melbourne associates beyond Guthrie and Nancy Grant were identified from London letters of the latter 1930s and the recollections recently of Melburnians. The years of his first acquaintance with these people are therefore not known. There were two groups. The first comprises friends from the National Gallery School when Miller was there, namely Guthrie Grant and his sister Nancy, John Vickery and probably Madge Freeman. The second group was connected with the Australian Art Association from around 1921. This accounts for his acquaintance with Melbourne artists Frank Crozier, Louis McCubbin, Carl Hampel, McInnes, George Bell, Napier Waller, probably Penleigh Boyd, and the Sydney architect and painter, John D Moore. A few people Miller knew are not known to have had a direct link with either group; for instance, artist and teacher Catherine Hardess, sculptor William Bowles, painter Arnold Shore and perhaps the artist’s model, Leslie Freedman 61. Shore and Freedman, however, were closely involved with Bell’s teaching activities in Melbourne from February 1932, which was a period that again saw Miller living briefly in Melbourne.
The Australian Art Association had been formed in Melbourne in 1912 to further the interests of professional artists [as opposed to bodies such as the Victorian Artists’ Society which welcomed amateur and professional alike]. Although the Association was to become involved in Melbourne art world politics in the early 1930s, activity during the early 1920s appears to have been limited to an annual exhibition at which the work of elected members and other invited artists was hung. It is here that the connections shared by some of Miller’s Melbourne associates arise. They either belonged to the Association or were invited to exhibit with the group in about 1921-22. Most were returned servicemen from World War I and in a few cases either they or a family member had, like Miller, been injured. All had also been students at the National Gallery School in Melbourne although this was generally before the war and so before Miller’s first enrolment there. Quite possibly Miller met one or other of these artists while being treated under the Repatriation conditions that applied for ex-soldiers. Alternatively, there may have been an art school connection; for instance, through Bessie Colquhoun whose family was close to the McCubbins and who was a drawing student in 1918 at the same time as Miller 62. Equally, Miller’s acquaintance with Crozier, Bell, McCubbin, Boyd and Waller could have come about in some more casual social manner since all mixed in Melbourne art circles through the 1920s.
Crozier and Bell, and perhaps Louis McCubbin, became close friends with Miller and although Waller is not mentioned in letters, Miller joined in social activities at his home. The Waller house in Ivanhoe was very near “Fairy Hills” which was the Darebin home of another important Australian Art Association member, Norman MacGeorge. These residences looked out over the Darebin Creek and Yarra River flowing through a heavily bushed locale that spread into the neighbouring suburb of Alphington where Crozier and McInnes had painted landscapes before World War I. Both houses were renowned between the wars and later as lively meeting places for artists and intellectuals. In consequence of their proximity and the commonality of interests shared by Waller and MacGeorge [such as their involvement with the Association and their emergent interest in Modernism from around the mid-1920s], visitors very probably intermingled between the two households 63. Miller may well have visited “Fairy Hills” as his friends Crozier and Bell also enjoyed friendships with MacGeorge.
The majority of these Melbourne artists exhibited with the Australian Art Association between 1922 and 1925. Most shared a general enthusiasm as well for landscape painting. Landscape was equally Miller’s favoured mode in Melbourne during the 1920s. It was therefore surely from within this group of professional artists that he found painting companions. Furthermore, since he had enrolled for drawing only at the National Gallery School, practical advice to round out his reading about painting was very probably gained from these artists. Much of these artists’ landscape painting, including Miller’s, can be located to Warrandyte and Eltham. However, there is a possibility of their working around Alphington and Ivanhoe.
By the mid-1920s a few Melbourne artists were turning towards European Modernism. Bell, Shore and Jock Frater led the movement. Shore’s and Frater’s interest showed first in work exhibited between 1926 and 1928. Their attempts were thoroughly derided by critics other than Bell who was more open to artistic experimentation. Bell took private pupils at his Toorak studio throughout the 1920s. Discussion there of the new movement was undoubtedly instrumental in bringing Bell’s more latent interest to the fore. A Modernist inclination began to emerge in his painting of the very late 1920s at about the time that Miller left Australia for London. However, nothing in Miller’s work suggests that he was at all drawn towards modern art theory before reaching Europe late in 1929. There seems little likelihood, therefore, that he took part in Bell’s classes of the late 1920s when Modernism came under discussion. Nor is it generally believed that he attended Bell’s more traditional classes of some years previously 64. However, Miller joined an artists’ group for the first time late in the 1920s and perhaps at the prompting of Crozier. This was the Victorian Artists’ Society in East Melbourne 65.
At the time Miller left for overseas in 1929 Melbourne, unlike Sydney, had been hardly touched by the modern movement. In fact, artistic attitudes there were mostly reactionary as Helmer records:
The Melbourne art scene was dominated by a group of men - artists, teachers and critics - that included Lindsay Bernard Hall, (Sir) Hans Heysen, John Longstaff, Max Meldrum, J.S. MacDonald, W.B. McInnes and Arthur Streeton and all of whom had rejected modern European trends in favour of the conventional and the tried . . . Together they formed a powerful reactionary establishment responsible for isolation, smug self-satisfaction with Australian art and anti-modernism that characterized the whole decade 66.
Three elements are generally held to be the keys to a more open attitude in Melbourne art circles that would eventually allow artistic expression there to keep pace with European advances. First were the paintings of Shore and Frater exhibited around 1926 that indicated that each had achieved some understanding of contemporary art. Their source was mostly the illustrations to the final sections of The Outline of Art by Sir William Orpen, which focussed on European modern artists. The volume was acquired by the State Library of Victoria in March 1924. Bell’s inquiring attitude from the mid-1920s was the second factor. The third was the opening late in the 1920s by Italian critic Gino Nibbi of a bookshop that stocked quality colour reproductions of contemporary European art and the latest books and art journals. The shop became an active force for Modernism in Melbourne but was too late to have impressed Miller before his departure for London 67. There was, however, an earlier and more generally unrecognised event that would have had impact on the local move towards Modernism. An exhibition of European paintings that Penleigh Boyd imported in 1923 had included contemporary British post-war work ‘in bright colours, crisp painting and [with] decorative emphasis’, as Smith writes 68. The work shown thus reflected the then dominant tendencies in British painting. Included were painters from the New English Art Club like Walter Richard Sickert and Philip Wilson Steer and English Modernists such as Roger Fry, Charles Ginner, Claude Flight, Duncan Grant and C R W Nevison 69. Perhaps the Post-Impressionist tendencies in the work of these artists have been rather overlooked in assessing the influences on Melbourne style in its move, admittedly slow, towards Modernism throughout the 1920s. Miller, for instance, almost immediately on reaching London in 1929 began to emulate the New English Art Club style of Post-Impressionism. Like Bell, therefore, he must be recognised as holding a more open mind to change in artistic expression than many others in Melbourne. Consequently his interest and appreciation of contemporary practices broadened extremely rapidly on reaching Europe.
A story related by McCulloch indicates that Miller may have been in need of psychological counselling during his Melbourne years. When living at Warrandyte he was unexpectedly visited by a group of three friends, one of whom was Frater, and who were all unknown to him at the time. Nobody appeared to be at home but because the house was open, they entered and began to comment on paintings lying around. Miller was there, however, and burst in brandishing a gun that Frater believed he would have used. Miller’s behaviour is explicable on one level simply as a reaction to intruders. But since the incident took place in the Australian bush where houses were generally left open, a question can be raised as to whether his reaction was not excessive and thus indicating a disposition to paranoia 70.
Little else is known of Miller’s life in Australia before he left for London in August 1929. It is possible that he stayed in Tasmania at an unknown time and he may have lived in Sydney between 1926-28. However, there are no traces of him moving in Sydney art circles through these years, just as there is very little recorded about him for Melbourne and Warrandyte throughout the 1920s 71.
In summary, we have seen how Miller mixed with artists of his own generation who, like himself, had seen war service, that he continued with the more intellectual pursuits of his youth such as the reading of serious authors and was already as shy and as retiring as in later life. Since his letters indicate a fondness of friends it seems that he was not disliked. Rather, any idiosyncrasies and personality difficulties that afflicted him can be expected to have been politely tolerated just as were those generally of other ex-servicemen returned from the 1914-18 war. It is clear that to a very large degree Miller was a self-taught painter. The knowledge and skills acquired over these ten years came from practical handbooks about painting in watercolour and oil, from his observations of pictures hung in Australian galleries and presumably from noting his fellow artists’ painting practices and taking their advice.
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Earliest work as an artist, 1918-1929
Determining a line of evolution for Miller’s work through to the close of the 1920s is not easy. Few pictures still exist and together with the paucity of letters or other written sources, this practically negates the use of stylistic analysis. As we have seen, his earliest artistic contacts were made in New Zealand through his attendance of drawing classes in Dunedin as early as 1911 and his acquaintance before 1918 with professional artists like Alfred O’Keeffe. When in 1918 a drawing student in Melbourne he was awarded a prize in New Zealand for a ‘Head from Life or the Antique’ [the work is no longer known]. By 1922 he was involved with landscape painting and aimed at achieving naturalistic representation 72. Little else can be said for these years with any accuracy apart from observing that an individual style to his work did not begin to emerge until the 1930s after he reached England. All that it is possible to assess for the 1920s, therefore, are likely influences on the work of this largely self-taught painter.
A particular technique found in his oil paintings that on subject matter alone can be assigned to the Melbourne years provides the evidence of the artist’s recourse to practical handbooks about painting. For a few if not all of the Warrandyte landscapes Miller articulated an underlying layer of paint with some stiff fine tool, perhaps a wire brush. The technique produced fine scratched lines resembling crosshatch shading in areas of the pictures and exposed the underlying priming layer. Paint was built up over this articulation, generally causing it to be evident in only a few places 73. This hatching technique was advocated by Solomon J Solomon in The Practice of Oil Painting and of Drawing as Associated with It, a book accessible to Miller. The tool used was a wire plush mat:
The wire plush mat . . . is quite the best kind of scraper. With it, you can erase the paint, particularly when dry, until the canvas is bared; and at any stage it can be used to restore a texture that may have been lost. The wire plush mat can be purchased at tool shops, and is sold in length . . . This mat is used mainly by plumbers 74.
Mounted on a base and about nine inches long the wire plush mat becomes a stiff wire brush fully consistent with producing the effect identified. Miller’s method for building his oil paintings during this earliest period could also owe a good deal to Solomon. After laying down a preliminary ‘drawing’ of his composition in washes of very thin mid-umber oil paint or sepia ink or a material of like nature, thin layers of oil were used to build up the picture with individual features of form almost flicked in using fine brush strokes 75. Examination of pictures from the period confirmed Ruskin to have been another of Miller’s primary sources, and in particular Modern Painters. Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics was also possibly used by the inexperienced painter. Furthermore Miller later admitted to the influence of Claude Lorrain and J M W Turner during these years. It is also very probable that Miller would have known of the strong views about art advocated by the Melbourne artist and teacher Max Meldrum from after 1917. Equally George Bell’s teaching in Melbourne through the 1920s was perhaps indirectly of assistance 76.
As noted in my introduction, Miller in 1959 identified his earliest period with his use of sepia and ‘working in monochrome’. Not many of the paintings either seen or available in colour reproduction that date from this early period can strictly be termed sepia pictures. Three are true sepia washes - Untitled (Landscape, Warrandyte) [Plate 1], Woodland clearing with a cow [Plate 2] and Corn ricks [Plate 3]. Two oils, Warrandyte landscape [Plate 4] and Dusk, Warrandyte (Early landscape, Warrandyte) [Plate 5], are largely in tones of ochre-greens through umbers and so are dominated by the brown tones typical of sepia monochrome. Lastly, six, which are in shades of ochres, ochre-greens and umbers with the admittance of some pale blues to brown-blues or greys are close to monochromal because of their use of desaturated colour. Representative of these are the oil, Early still life [Plate 8] and the watercolour, Landscape of Warrandyte [Plate 9]. One very fine painting here, Haystacks [Plate 7], has touches of mauve present as well 77. Miller’s aspirations in these pictures can be ascertained from his recognition in 1959 of sepia and monochrome techniques as capable of producing ‘simplicity, dignity, power and light’ in painting, in other words, the conveyance of atmospheric light and nature’s chiaroscuro. The work is thus an extension of a predominant concern that ran through nineteenth century painting. By the turn of the twentieth century Claude and Turner were firmly established as the forebears of this approach for the English art world. Grahame observes that although Claude had perhaps by then been eclipsed by Turner by way of Ruskin’s writings:
Claude’s real merit . . . his real service to landscape art, lay in this, that he was the first painter to grapple seriously with the problem of representing the disc of the sun . . . Claude’s influence on landscape art continued paramount, more particularly in England, down to the middle of our century. It left its mark indelibly on Turner’s genius . . . Claude had grasped one big fact, the warm glow of sunlight, and repeated it ad infinitum, spreading it with an even touch over every inch of canvas. Turner went a step further. He analysed this glow, caught from Nature the secret of the subtle silvery tones, the touches of cold colour which occur even in the warmest effect of light and help to heighten those effects 78.
Many nineteenth century theorists stressed the advisability of the student painter working initially in sepia. This was because form was seen as the artist’s principal focus. Sepia enabled the study of the effects of light on form or more specifically, the understanding of light and shade and tonal relationships reflected in nature. This may be what Miller meant when he referred to his monochrome period. Ruskin viewed colour as a secondary quality [or power] because its association with sensation meant that it could never completely become a distinguishing factor for any object. In contrast form was a primary quality in that every object was characterised by a distinctive form that separated it from all else. Form was absolute while colour was relative. While colour in nature was ‘in a state of perpetual confusion and indistinctness . . . her forms, as told by light and shade, are invariably clear, distinct, and speaking’ 79.
The earliest known work by Miller is Untitled (Landscape, Warrandyte) [Plate 1], which is a sepia ink pen and wash sketch. It represents a cove with background hills reflected in the still water of the mid-distance rather than a Warrandyte landscape. A model for the design could have been the Bent tree, ca 1864, by Jean Corot. The painting, held by the Louvre, was used by Meldrum as an illustration to his Melbourne lecture, ‘The invariable truths of depictive art’, and reproduced with the essay published probably in about 1917 80. Furthermore a variation on the theme by Corot, The bent tree, morning, ca 1855-60, entered the National Gallery of Victoria in 1907 and thus may well have become known to Miller when at the National Gallery School 81. Other influences are recognisable as well. The style of the foliage although quite poorly executed is of the tradition descended from Claude embodied in eighteenth and nineteenth century watercolour practice and publicised in Ruskin’s Modern Painters. Ruskin’s plate ‘Ramification, according to Claude’ [see Plate 138] illustrates in simplified manner Claude’s treatment of branches and forks of trees with a little foliage sketched in. The handling of the foliage on the lower right is similar to Miller’s method in Untitled (Landscape, Warrandyte) [Plate 1] although Miller’s branches are much freer. This Claude-inspired handling of form reflects also in more accomplished early works by Miller; for instance, in the foliage of Woodland clearing with a cow [Plate 2] with its asymmetrical balancing of masses. Furthermore, to return to Untitled (Landscape, Warrandyte) [Plate 1], Miller’s structuring of movement into distance using lighter planes located above a dark foreground, even if clumsily accomplished, reflects practices by Claude and in Turner’s early paintings [this is found in other Miller work from the 1920s] 82. Although Miller admitted that his earliest painting efforts owed much to Claude and Turner he did not see paintings by Claude until after reaching London in 1929 83. He would therefore have known of these practices previously in Melbourne only through reproduction in books such as the Liber Veritatis, Grahame and Ruskin 84. Turner by contrast could be seen in the original - two of his early oil paintings, Dunstanborough Castle, sunrise after a squally night, 1798 [Plate 135], and Walton Bridges, ca 1806, and a later watercolour, Okehampton, Devonshire, ca 1826, had entered the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria before 1920 85. Turner’s Liber Studorium was also available 86, while Ruskin’s Modern Painters was an equally important source for Turner’s artistic practice to a student during the 1920s [as noted, both were previously known to Miller as a youth in New Zealand]. But it would be rash to ascribe to any one foundation these modes of pictorial treatment that had so thoroughly permeated the picturesque landscape painting tradition for more than a century.
Moving beyond a student’s first workings in sepia, by the late nineteenth century many theorists accepted that a painter’s understanding of light and shade was best accomplished through working with a very restricted, desaturated and close-hued colour palette. This approach had been very clearly advised by Rood in 1879 in his most important book Modern Chromatics with Applications to Art and Industry. Not only were nineteenth century scientific theories about colour examined here but their implications for both painting and the decorative arts were also explored. Rood, like many other theorists then, believed that:
The object of painting is the production, by the use of colour, of more or less perfect representations of natural objects . . . [T]he painter is to a considerable extent restricted in the choice of his tints; he must use mainly the pale unsaturated colours of nature . . . [H]e makes enormous use of graduation in light and shade and in colour; labours to express distance . . . [He] is delighted to hide as it were his very colour, and to leave the observer in doubt as to its very nature.
However, Rood argued that colour held a significance of its own beyond the simple role of adorning form realised through chiaroscuro. Chromatic composition was important in painting as well and he gave advice on the ‘links which connect designs in mere light and shade with works in colour’:
We have, as the first step, pictures executed essentially in one tint, but with endless small modifications. In this way a peculiar luminous glow is introduced which is never exhibited by designs executed solely in black and white, or indeed in any one tint. As example of this kind of work we may mention drawings in sepia or bistre, in which the tint is varied by the introduction here and there of different quantities of some other brown having a reddish, yellowish, or orange hue 87.
The three ink sketches, Untitled (Landscape, Warrandyte) [Plate 1], Woodland clearing with a cow [Plate 2] and Corn ricks [Plate 3] show Miller’s experiments in sepia. Warrandyte landscape [Plate 4] and Dusk, Warrandyte (Early landscape, Warrandyte) [Plate 5] likewise correspond with this first of Rood’s steps where ‘some other browns’ were introduced. Dusk, Warrandyte is painted in related umber and ochre-green hues with, as Jacqueline Macnaughton observed, ‘tiny flicks of red heightening certain features’ 88. Warrandyte landscape builds on this range by introducing blue rather than red. Rood’s advice also approaches Ruskin’s belief in the need that each picture carry its own dominant hue. The “chief light” or illumination of a landscape, in its character of either warmth or coldness, set the hue of colour needed in the relations of shadow to light throughout a canvas if a unified work was to be created 89. This became the major nineteenth century view. A painting that sought to represent a warmly lit scene would thus need to be structured in hues that were high-valued, that is, colours geared towards the yellow-oranges. Conversely, a cold light required low-value hues, that is, colours mitigated by the blue-violets. With a dominant colour key represented across the picture plane the hues of a painting would be analogous [rather than contrasting] 90. Because of this such paintings can be regarded as monochromatic.
Warrandyte landscape [Plate 4] and Dusk, Warrandyte (Early landscape, Warrandyte) [Plate 5], together with the one still life known from this period, Early still life [Plate 8], all make use of analogous hues and show a change also in Miller’s treatment of pictorial space. The two landscapes are in keeping with New Zealand tendencies towards flatter and softer imagery during the early decades of the twentieth century. This contrasts with the more volumetric, better-defined and sharper plein air style that prevailed in Australian art at about the time of Miller’s arrival there. However, they also introduce a new type of perspective. Dusk, Warrandyte, which is essentially composed as three planes [tree masses, hillside and sky] sits quite flatly on the canvas surface without the usual planar recession into depth and with little sense of object volume. Space and distance are conveyed through the devices of atmospheric colour and diminishing perspective rather than by the darker-foreground-to-lighter-distance technique. It is in these three canvases that Miller’s debt to the mature Turner and to his fellow artists locally becomes apparent. This is not only in the even quality of the atmospheric light generated throughout the pictures and in the tonal treatment. It comes also from the loose, scumbly paint applications that dissolve edges to move form into form in representing the atmospheric effects of light 91. Solomon included scumbling in his method with monochrome 92. A more immediate experience by Miller of the technique was possible either from studying Turner’s Dunstanborough Castle, sunrise after a squally night [Plate 135] or from his Impressionist-inspired confreres like McInnes [Plate 157] and Bell [Plate 158]. However, Dunstanborough Castle does not have a light foreground. Neither does the Gallery’s other Turner oil, Walton Bridges, although a light foreground characterises their late Turner watercolour, Okehampton, Devonshire. Accordingly, apart from Ruskin’s Modern Painters, reproductions and local Melbourne art practice must be assumed to have been Miller’s primary aids through the 1920s towards realising his changing approach to the representation of light in painting.
Miller’s inclination towards flattened, diffuse imagery occurs in the drawing Paddock with two cows [Plate 104]. The treatment of the tree trunks and leaf masses of Paddock with two cows is found again in a page of tree sketches, Tree study [Plate 105]. A pronounced difference exists between these paintings and the drawings. Forms in the drawings are sharper. Indeed Tree study is almost Art Nouveau in style through the emphasis placed on contour as defining line. As we saw, attention to outline was encouraged at Melbourne’s National Gallery School. Furthermore Art Nouveau was well established in Melbourne by the 1920s 93. The lack of object volume present in these drawings is observable again, although to a lesser extent, in two figure studies, Seated figure [Plate 106] and a double study of a head [Plate 107]. Seated figure is visually flattened through the shading lines being applied in predominantly one direction, in this case the vertical. Yet the fine line defining the figure and the placement of the shading creates a sense of volume as a felt presence. The sensitively depicted study of heads, although artistically immature still, again has a tendency to a single direction in its shading line [but now a diagonal] and is slightly more volumetric in form 94. The same characteristic, a single direction, informs the brushwork of at least one of Miller’s “flatter” paintings - especially in the sky treatment of Warrandyte landscape [Plate 4]. Preliminary evidence of Miller’s involvement with a Modernist [and abstract] notion, the dichotomy between the artist’s flat working surfaces and volume in real space could perhaps be present here. Only one painting from the Melbourne years, Early still life [Plate 8], in similar fashion to the two drawings just discussed shows a concern by Miller with representing object volume. Generally, and in conclusion about his treatment of pictorial space at this time, a sense of flattened space is more typical of the earliest work in Australia. A greater sense of volume only becomes more pronounced in Miller’s drawings after he joined classes at the Slade in London after 1929.
Haystacks [Plate 7], Early still life [Plate 8] and Landscape of Warrandyte [Plate 9] introduce the third of Miller’s methods with colour during these years - the use of monochromatically inclined desaturated shades of ochres, ochre-greens and umbers with the admittance of some pale blues to brown-blues or greys. Once again his practice was in accord with nineteenth century theorists. For instance, Rood continued his advice:
In the next stage the design is worked out essentially in bluish and brownish tints. If a landscape, the distance and much of the sky will be greyish-blue; the foreground, on the other hand, a rich warm brown, with here and there a few touches of more positive colour. The blue of the distance will be variously modified, having often a greenish hue, and being replaced in the more highly illuminated portions by a yellowish tint. No real attempt will be made to render correctly the natural colours of the objects depicted, except as they happen to fall in with the system adopted. By this mode of working, distance and luminosity can be represented far more effectively than by the mere use of black and white.
Landscape of Warrandyte [Plate 9] associates with this next of Rood’s steps, ‘designs . . . worked out essentially in bluish and brownish tints’. Furthermore Rood advised:
Designs of this kind merge by insensible degrees into others, where the strong browns of the foreground vanish, and are replaced by a set of tints which, though not very positive, yet represent the actual colours of the scene somewhat more truly. The rather uniform bluish-grey of the distance, also, is exchanged for a greater variety of cool bluish tints, and faint violet and purple hues begin to mingle with the other colours. The yellows and orange-yellows become more pronounced, but decided greens are not admitted except in very small touches, and as the local colour requires it.
Haystacks [Plate 7], which has touches of mauve, is a successful picture in this last mode. Rood concluded his discussion of the three primary stages in the handling of colour thus:
This mode of using colour is of course conventional, and pictures of this kind are not to be regarded as executed in colour, in the full sense of the word 95.
Miller’s involvement with colour in this fuller sense would not take place until his artistic experience began to broaden significantly in London and Europe.
The two well-known Melbourne teachers active during this first phase of Miller’s career largely endorsed the opinions and approaches advised by these various theorists. Meldrum placed great importance on tonal relationships. By working in monochrome, he taught, an artist would concern himself purely with tone and proportion. Early still life [Plate 8] by Miller lies close to Meldrum’s teaching. As can be seen, the shadow areas of forms have been built up tonally through the modification of their colour by the addition of greys or black and darker browns. Miller would refer to this traditional technique as the “dirtying” of colour. Lastly with regard to Melbourne artistic practices of the 1920s it is worth noting that Bell set watercolour exercises in two colours, burnt sienna and prussian blue. Miller’s use of these two colours together may, therefore, have derived from Bell’s advice, although as has been shown other theorists advised likewise 96.
To sum up, the major lesson Miller learnt from his exploration of light and colour representation over those early years accords with the advice of Ruskin, Rood and Solomon about the painter’s main concern, the ability to manipulate close-valued hues within a dominant colour key, or mood, so to create a harmonious representation of what the artist sees. An artist needed to analyse his vision into a restricted number of elements in order to achieve this harmonious representation. As Ruskin had stressed the painter cannot represent the complexity of visual sensations experienced and yet create an æsthetically satisfying work that is an analogue of nature and not a “photographic” copy. Miller’s early drawings and paintings show his acquisition of these artistic skills over the eleven or so years spent around Melbourne. More importantly they emphasise his concern then about compositional design and the role of light in structuring visual perception, qualities he admired in Claude. In the watercolour Landscape of Warrandyte [Plate 9] the aerial perspective deployed creates both a real sense of the wide sweep in landscape that our eye perceives and the soft flat definition of features in distance that is imposed by the atmosphere lying between them and the eye. On the other hand, Early still life [Plate 8] depicts the way in which light plays on objects within closer vision to create an immediate presence. Despite the solidarity and denseness given here to form, the visual impact is not especially weighty. Miller did not make similar progress with colour during these years. His approach there remained essentially monochromatic because of the unsaturated hues deployed. What might be held to be a colourist concern makes a token appearance in just a few works. This is the harmony coming from his dull bluish and yellow-brown tones approximating the blue and yellow of colour-light contrast. Yet these are far from the pure hues more generally accepted as contributing harmony built through complementary colour-light contrast 97. Moreover blue and yellow intermingled in Ruskin’s writings only as colours in nature. Although Rood wrote of the scientific theories of colour, what is not evident with Miller in this period are pictures indicative of a move to painting Rood’s ‘genuine works in colour’ 98. There are no saturated hues or attempts at other colour-light complementary contrasts or Rood’s pairs and triads in these early pictures. If Miller drew anything from Rood at this early stage of his career it is only to the extent that Rood’s advice about painting coincided with Ruskin’s. Miller’s artistic practices during the 1920s accord with the general aspirations then of many Melbourne artists, which compounds the difficulty of isolating his specific sources.
In conclusion, the most important lessons about visual expression absorbed by Miller during the first period of his career involved the representation of volume, or light and shade, and the associated tonal manipulation of colour. In the process of absorbing these lessons his work shifted from being characterised by practices rooted in Claude’s painting of the seventeenth century to a style that both in its spatial and colour attributes lay closer to nineteenth century practice. By the late 1920s his work accorded most generally with the conservatism then prevalent in the work of Melbourne artists. Miller appears to have consciously restricted his exploration of technique and colour to approaches advised by theoreticians as appropriate to an art student. As a result his development as a painter was extremely slow. This approach to art by Miller can be accounted for by his ill health and a lack of a full commitment to painting. Both these factors were to alter within a few years of his arrival in London, although he continued to be of uncertain health.
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