Professor Leslie William Miller (August 5, 1848 – March 7, 1931) was an artist, educator, and principal of the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art for forty years, 1880–1920.

[2] Miller came to Philadelphia in Summer 1880 as PMSIA's first principal,[2] at the same time that Eakins was teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Former student Charles Sheeler recalled Eakins visiting PMSIA to work on the portrait (probably in late 1900): "One day a stocky little man, gray-haired and gray-bearded, passed through our workroom.

His trousers were tucked into short leather boots and fitted so snugly as to make the braces over his dark sweater superfluous.

The subject was to be portrayed standing easily with one hand in his trousers pocket and the other holding a manuscript from which he raised his eyes as if to direct them toward an audience.

"Several months were thus consumed; then came the day, as we discovered through the convenient knotholes, when another perspective drawing was made and transferred to the canvas, on the floor and to one side.

The painting's eye level is unusually high and the color range limited, leading the viewer to Miller's face.

"Ever since I found out how much of a picture he was going to make of it, I have been haunted by a mild regret that I didn't insist on his painting me,—if he painted me at all,— in habilments [sic] that would at least have been more like those I would have worn when appearing in any such character as that in which he has done me the honor to portray me, but, as is evident throughout all his work, he had a passion for the ultra informal which sometimes carried him so far as to lead him to prefer the unfit to the fit if it were only old, and worn and familiar enough.