Upon his return to America, he settled briefly in Pasadena, California and then in the art colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he remained for the rest of his life.

His father, Richard Levi Miller, was a well-respected civil engineer from Pennsylvania, who specialized in bridges and his mother was Esmerelda Story, a native of Missouri.

The courses he took in Drawing, Modeling, Painting, Artistic Anatomy, Perspective, and Composition would have been very similar to what a student in France would have received at that time.

He was subsequently honored by receiving the first scholarship to study in Paris awarded by the St. Louis School of Fine Arts Student Association.

Miller's work was critiqued by Jean-Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant, two accomplished academic painters who had an excellent reputation in the Salon.

He would spend summers in the American Art Colony of Giverny, which grew around Claude Monet's estate at about 1906, where he became close friends with Frederick Frieseke, another Impressionist painter.

In contrast, Miller had an excellent reputation as a teacher and a number of his students followed him to Giverny, including John "Jack" Frost, the son of the well known illustrator A.

Because of his friendship with Guy Rose in Giverny, Miller moved west to the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena to teach at the Stickney Memorial Art School.

"[9] Late in his career, his work turned darker in palette and more somber in subject and these paintings are not in the same demand as the sunnier depictions of idle women.