Charles Henry Miller is remembered chiefly for his association with Long Island, the history and landscape of which he celebrated in his writings and paintings. As a boy, Miller developed an interest in drawing, studying in the Academy's Antique School from 1859 to 1861 and successfully submitting a painting of a barn scene (The Challenge Accepted) to the NAD annual in 1860, at age eighteen. Nevertheless, his father was opposed to an artistic career, and after graduating from the Mount Washington Collegiate Institute, Miller was sent to the New York Homeopathic Medical Institute, finishing in 1863. The next year, he sailed as ship's doctor on the European-bound Harvest Queen. After sketching in England and on the continent, he returned to New York determined to become a landscape painter.
Miller's period of study included another season (1867) at the NAD Antique School before he left again for Europe, settling for three years in Munich, where he studied at the Royal Academy under Karl von Piloty and Wilhelm von Kaulbach. His principal master, however, was the Barbizon-influenced Adolf Heinrich Lier. Returning to New York in 1870, Miller began a decades-long stint of uninterrupted exhibiting at Academy Annuals. From the outset, he was a somewhat controversial figure; two years after his election as an Academician he served (with Thomas Le Clear and A. Wordsworth Thompson) on the infamous 1877 Hanging Committee which enraged the conservative leadership of the Academy by reserving the best places on the line in the Annual Exhibition for the Younger artists returning from Europe. Although he remained a member for only a few years, Miller identified with the Society of American Artists and its bias toward French and German training.
The late 1870s and early 1880s were the years of greatest acclaim for Miller, and despite his liberal stance, he was elected to the Nad Council for a three-year term in 1883. In addition to paining, he wrote poetry and prose, publishing his treatise, The Philosophy of Art in America (under the pen name of Carl De Muldor), in 1885. An 1889 sale of his works and those by other artists which he owned brought nearly $18,000, further attesting to his success and esteem.
During his later career, Miller was more retiring, devoting time to conservation efforts on Long Island and to the Queens Borough Society of Allied Arts and Crafts which he formed in 1910 and presided over until his death. He married Elizabeth D. Mosback in 1900 and soon after, moved permanently to Queenlawn, his home in what is now Queens, New York. His faithful attendance at Academy meetings made Miller into something of an institution, "where his face with its fresh color and white beard was a real trademark."
