Lot Essay
When Richard Miller was living in Paris in 1906, he painted a series of works that portrayed the city's nightlife. Café Society is part of this series in which Miller developed and expanded on a theme which had been introduced by the Impressionists a generation earlier. Unlike the French painters who used cafés of Paris "to portray the reality of modern urban life... Miller's interest was not in capturing the reality of café-life; he was drawn instead to its decorative veneer--women in their fancy clothes; flower stalls; rosy, polished marble tables and shining glassware" (M.L. Kane, A Bright Oasis, New York, 1997, p. 23). The demeanor of Miller's later work, in which he created restrained yet dynamic paintings of women, is evident in this early work. Miller has included enough detail to provide the ambiance of the Paris café while letting the viewer gaze at the attractive, well-dressed young woman who is the subject of the painting. Mary Louise Kane has noted that "Miller, even more than his older contemporary Jean Béraud (1849-1936), painter of fashionable Parisian street life, confected a feast for the eye. His were not objective slice-of-life vignettes but artful decorations of contemporary life, each wrapped in its own color scheme." (A Bright Oasis, p. 23)