Archibald Eliot Haswell Miller (1887-1979)

Bridge of St Martin, Toledo or Puente San Martin, Toledo 🔴

Signed: "A.E. Haswell Miller 1924”

Oil on Canvas

Exhibited Royal Academy, 1924

Archibald Eliot Haswell Miller was an interesting and enigmatic painter whose artistic ambitions fell to the more pressing demands of the period.

He served with the Blythswood Rifles in WWI and was part of the expeditionary force that took Jerusalem in late 1917, likely witnessing the historic moment that General Allenby entered the city on foot, in contrast to the Kaiser’s entry on horseback in 1898. He was on the Western Front late in the war, receiving injuries as well as a military cross during the Hundred Days Offensive of 1918. In the Second World War he served in Intelligence, as a captain in the Prisoner of War Interrogation Section (PWIS), a position he was suited to because of his fluency in German, French, Italian and Spanish.

Knowing Miller’s linguistic skills and his later ties to British Intelligence, it is perhaps interesting to note that he spent his early years travelling through Europe; a boyish fascination with military matters leading him to paint the colourful uniforms being swept away by the grey uniformity of modern industrial war. These studies were extensive and well observed, and it is possible that the chance to record them at close quarters, could have given the necessary cover for observing more useful military details

Between the wars, Miller, like many British veterans of the time, Including the poet Robert Graves (1895-1985), found rest in the Iberian Peninsula, one of the few areas of Europe to escape the horrors of the First World War, and whose dry heat and arid plains were far from the damp squalor of the trenches.

His pictures suggest that he remained in the Castilian heartlands: Toledo, Segovia and Avila - frontier citadels that vacillated between Moorish and Christian control. Much like the landscapes of El Greco (1541-1614), these paintings have an almost medieval lack of perspective, with small figures shuffling through an immense and celestial city.

This period was one of the few times that Miller could give himself to being an artist. Many of his large canvases from this period were exhibited at the Royal Academy and have since found their way to public collections. They seem to have derived from pencil studies, suggesting a level of care not often attained in a career hampered by wartime responsibilities and administrative duties at the Scottish National Gallery.