According to the information on her Daughters of the American Revolution application form, she was born Lola McDonald in Memphis, Missouri, to farmer Sterling Lynn McDonald and his wife Electa Summerlin;[1][2] a birthplace of either Edina, Missouri or Croton, Iowa has also been posited, as has a birthyear of 1864 or 1866.
[3] She married Francis Sleeth, and from 1892 to 1899 was resident in San Francisco, where she studied with Douglas Tilden at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute.
In Paris she studied with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and at the Académie Julian, and in New York City with Frederick MacMonnies and Emil Carlsen.
She began working as an art teacher at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. in 1901,[4] remaining there for over thirty years.
[3] Sometime in the 1920s she first visited Laguna Beach, California, and after marrying inventor T. Spencer Miller in 1931 moved there permanently, living there until her death.