Key Information
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Miller, Alec
Parallel form(s) of name
- Miller, Alexander
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Dates of existence
1879-1961
History
Alec was born in 1879 in Glasgow into a poor family living in a two-roomed tenement. He left school aged 12 and served a 7 year apprenticeship in a woodcarving studio run by Miss C P Anstruther, (Mrs Mackay), qualifying as a journeyman in 1898. From about 1895 until 1902 he attended drawing and art classes at evenings and weekends, mostly at the Glasgow School of Art.
In 1902, at the suggestion of Mrs Mackay, he applied for a position in the Guild of Handicraft run by CR Ashbee and joined it as it moved from Whitechapel to Chipping Campden. Here he began to do a great deal of ecclesiastical work resulting from Ashbee's work as an Architect' as well as other work, including modelling figures for casting by the silversmiths. After the Guild closed in 1908 he took over the Guild carving workshop and ran it as an independent business until he emigrated in 1939.
During the Guild years and after he also developed his skills as a stone carver and did much stone work both for churches and secular commissions. In all his work he carved directly into the material, he did not work from modelled figures, a method of working which had been out of favour and which he was one of the first to employ at the beginning of the new century. From about 1912 he began to carve portrait heads and busts in wood and near the end of his life he believed he had made over 600 in England and America.
He was nominated for the Slade Professorship in 1921, but was not successful. However, by this time he was developing an additional career in lecturing - not merely on art/sculpture related subjects, becoming sought after on both sides of the Atlantic. He made a number of lecture/work tours to the US between the wars.
He emigrated to America in 1939 and eventually settled in California.
After the end of the War he wrote two books, one technical and the other a history of sculpture which expressed the ideas and feelings he had developed during his working life for his work. He had been appointed by Ashbee as his literary executor, and also wrote a history of the Guild of Handicraft at Ashbee's request.
He died in England during what he knew would be his last visit and is buried in the churchyard at St Nicolas at Wade in Kent - the church in which he had been married in 1909.
Apart from many churches and homes, there are examples of his work in the Guild of Handicraft Museum in Chipping Campden, The Museum and Art Gallery in Cheltenham,' The Glasgow Museum, The National Portrait Gallery. There is also a large archive of pictures and letters in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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Sources
- Email from Graham Peel, author of, 'Alec Miller, Carver Guildsman Sculptor"
- Alec (Alexander) Miller', Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011 [http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib6_1232987006, accessed 05 May 2020]