Ebenezer Templeton Miller, c. 1830

Unknown Artist, Ebenezer Templeton Miller, c. 1830. Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in. Gift of Mrs. W. Foster Gillespie (Gertrude Miller).

While portraiture was accessible only to the wealthiest Americans in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century saw a wider swath of the population gain access to portraitists’ services. Lucinda Davis and Ebenezer Templeton Miller married in 1830 in Jacksonville, Illinois. At the time they were nineteen and twenty-nine years old, respectively. Families often commemorated a marriage through portraits of the bride and groom, who face one another across the frame as they embark on their married journey together.

As an academic tradition developed in the United States, some artists went through rigorous training while others either remote from metropolitan centers or without the financial means to attend an academy continued to learn primarily by studying the works of other artists. The unknown artist who produced the portraits of Lucinda Templeton Miller and Ebenezer Templeton Miller likely had some artistic training; however, the flat quality of the figures’ clothing and a lack of convincing perspective into the background suggest that he did not go through rigorous formal training.

The painterly quality of the sitters’ faces and their penetrating gazes, which arrest the viewer’s attention, ground the portraits and reflect a talent that rises above the relative flatness of the drapery and background. The artist also works in the republican style made popular by Gilbert Stuart around the turn of the nineteenth century – a half-length portrait that focuses on the character of the sitter rather than on a profusion of attributes – while simultaneously retaining the grand manner conventions of columns and red swag curtains.