Caller Waiting

Maker Kenneth Hayes Miller (American, 1876 - 1952)

Collections

ClassificationsPAINTINGS

Date1928

Mediumoil on canvas

Dimensionscanvas: 50 1/2 × 40 1/2 in. (128.3 × 102.9 cm.) frame: 59 × 49 × 2 1/4 in. (149.9 × 124.5 × 5.7 cm.)

Signed2Signed and dated in lower left of recto: Hayes Miller / 28

InscribedSigned and dated in lower left of recto: Hayes Miller / 28

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Art Collectors' Council

Status

On view

Label TextKenneth Hayes Miller imbued the bourgeois woman in Caller Waiting with the monumentality and gravitas of an Italian Renaissance Madonna. Wearing a fur coat and gold necklace, the sitter has the solidity, generalized features, and enigmatic expression characteristic of women painted by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Miller's observations of contemporary urban fashion and manners link him to the Ashcan School, but he turned away from their painterly style and modern color theories to develop his own timeless quality based on the great masters of Western painting.
For over 40 years, beginning in 1911, Miller taught at the Art Students League of New York, where his students included Reginald Marsh (see Marsh's Girls on this wall). Miller and his students, known as the Fourteenth Street School, offered an urban complement to the Regionalism of artists such as Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry during the 1930s.

Object number2003.7