The Pool

The Pool is one of several depictions of elegant women posed in a garden that Richard E. Miller painted as he worked in the artists' colony of Giverny, in Normandy, France. Shadowed by a green parasol, eyes closed in reverie, the graceful young woman sits in profile on the edge of a circular reflecting pool, an echo of the mirrors occasionally featured in the artist’s interior scenes, such as The White Shawl (TF 1992.50). Behind her, two empty chairs and a table topped by a white cloth are set on the lawn stretching toward an undefined background on the high horizon. The parasol and items of furniture, as well as the woman’s figure, are firmly delineated; the model’s face, in particular, features the lustrous smoothness of a cameo portrait. The richly textured background, however, almost dissolves in a tapestry of active paint strokes in pure, bright color dominated by Miller’s signature green.

In Giverny, where Miller worked between about 1906 and 1911, he gradually adopted the distinct brushstrokes and bright pastel tones of "decorative impressionism" and confirmed his dedication to the female figure as his primary subject. His colleagues in the village Lawton Parker (1868–1954), Karl Buehr (1866–1952), and Frederick Frieseke also depicted women at leisure. They often painted in the garden of Le Hameau (“the hamlet”), a Giverny house leased to Mary C. Wheeler (1846–1920), an artist and educator from Rhode Island who beginning in 1907brought her students to Giverny seasonally for instruction by visiting artists such as Miller and Frieseke. The circular reflecting pool in the garden of Le Hameau was not unique in Giverny, but the presence in Miller’s painting of the same green garden furniture seen in Frieseke’s Breakfast in the Garden (TF 1987.21) and Lilies (TF 1999.55), which are thought to have been painted in this garden, suggest that Miller painted The Pool there as well. These artists and their Giverny associates exhibited together as the "Giverny Group" in New York in 1910. They all exploited the decorative possibilities of brightly colored parasols and elegant clothing in paintings which evoke a hermetic garden world of rich color and gentle sunlight.

Miller’s treatment of light in The Pool reflects the distinct nature of his personal approach to a style often called "decorative impressionism." Unlike Frieseke, Miller painted his models in the garden in relative shadow. In this work, the dark area behind the woman and the reflections in the water suggest she is shadowed by an unseen tree as much as by her parasol, which further blocks rather than transmits light. The artist more typically applied his interest in light effects to studies of figures posed indoors against midday sunshine flooding through an open door or penetrating half-closed window blinds.

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