the signet library 200th anniversary online exhibition

Signet Library Art and Artifacts:

The Sketchbooks of William Millar (1796-1882)

Introduction

William Miller was an Edinburgh artist and engraver born to a Quaker family who had settled in the city in the year of the Glorious Revolution. Miller’s father was a shawl manufacturer who had intended his son to follow him into business, but the son’s love for the arts led to his instead being apprenticed to engraver William Archibald after which the tone of his life was set. He would go on to be an illustrator for the great Scottish serial publications and encyclopaedias, but he is best known now for having been J.M.W. Turner’s favourite interpreter and the engraver to whom he turned for his most important work.

portraits of william miller in Signet library collections

From 1819 he spent a number of years working in London at the studio of George Cooke, but he returned to Edinburgh in 1821 and spent the rest of his life at the family home in Hope Park, later renamed Millerfield. Sciennes Primary School now occupies the site.

two photographs and a plan of hope park (millerfield) from signet library collections

In the 1940s, Miller’s descendants distributed his archive around a small number of libraries across the UK in places that had been important to him. The Signet Library was one such beneficiary and was presented with two sketchbooks dating from the years around Miller’s London sojourn, a magnificent album of proof engravings by Miller, and the Miller family’s own annotated copy of Miller’s biography Memorials of Hope Park.

Here we present a series of sketches taken from William Miller’s sketchbooks, which include as subjects the city of Edinburgh, the town of Lewes, Brighton, and France. Click here to tour the sketches, which can be enlarged for closer viewing.