American painter and etcher

Warren, Ohio 1860 – 1913 South Norwalk, Connecticut 

 

Orientalist and landscape painter.

 

Son of a Scottish minister of the United Brethern church.

Pupil in Cincinnati of De Scott Evans at the start of the 1880s.

 

Pupil during the middle of the 1890s in Paris of the French Orientalist and portrait painter Benjamin Constant (1845 – 1902), of the French Neo-Impressionist and pointillist painter Henri Martin (1860 – 1943) and of the flamboyant Italian portrait painter Giovanni Boldini (1842 -1931).

 

Millar stayed for several years in Europe. He also visited Holland, Spain and Algiers; views of this town became his favourite Oriental subject in painting and in etching. 

Many of his Orientalist paintings follow the same scheme: an open shop in the Bazaar of Algiers with a variation of commercial activity and merchandise and of customers and bystanders.

 

By the late 1890s Millar had returned to the USA; he lived in New York.

 

Millar and his wife, Jane Craft, and a friend of the family were killed in 1913 in a car accident in Connecticut: while crossing the railway tracks their car was hit by a train. Their 15-years old daughter, Dorothy, survived the crash. She later became an interior decorator in Boston.

 

 

It is a typical example of a romanticized view of the Orient painted in an Impressionist technique.

Millar must not have stayed very long in Algiers, but for the rest of his career he regularly turned to painting exotic views of its Bazaar.

On some of his paintings one finds, next to the signature, a print of his thumb, as is the case here.

 

 

Because it is a very good example of the art of Millar: a romanticized, Impressionist snapshot of life and business in the Bazaar of Algiers.