Elected ARSA: 16 March 1938
Josephine Haswell Miller was the first woman to become a Member of the Royal Scottish Academy, a distinction she achieved when, in 1938, she was elected to Associate rank. The significance of her achievement lies not only in her acceptance as an equal by her contemporaries and peers into a jealously guarded all male preserve, but even moreto the fact that through her outstanding ability and effort she blazed a trail which she and others have followed to the lasting benefit of the Academy.
The daughter of Alan and Helen Cameron, she was born in Glasgow on 1st October 1890 and educated at Woodside School. She attended the Glasgow Schoolof Art from 1909 to 1914 where she studied Painting and Design under Maurice Greiffenhagen and Anning Bell and in her final year she gained the School’s most coveted and highest award, The Haldane Travelling Scholarship, which led to study in Paris and later, in London, with Walter Sickert.
She taught in Scotland during the war years, and in 1916 married A. E. Haswell Miller, then an officer in the 7th Battalion H.L.I. and a former colleague of her student days. When peace returned she joined the staff of the Glasgow School, in charge of Etching and Prints. She continued actively to practise her own Art and became a frequent contributor to many of the Scottish and English Exhibitions, her subjects varying chiefly from Landscape to Portraits.
Teaching provided her with considerable opportunities for travel which were gratefully seized and much ofher work was the outcome of visits to France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Spain.
The family left Glasgow for Edinburgh in 1932 when her husband, himself a highly gifted painter, was appointed Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland. On his retiral in 1952 they moved to Dorset, thereby debarring her from any prospect of election to Academician rank. Even so, and despite recurring bouts of serious illness, she continued until very recently to contribute regularly to the Academy’s exhibitions.
It is difficult now, nearly 40 years since her election to the Academy, when most of her contemporaries are dead and after the radical change of values suffered by our society, not least in the appreciation and practice of the Arts, to make a just assessment of Josephine’s career which held so much promise, but there is little doubt she was a star in her generation and a woman who combined great sensitivity and charm with outstanding artistic gifts and exceptional achievements.
Her generation suffered more than most through two world wars with the havoc they brought in their train and she was no exception. Her quiet pictures, with their cool tonalities, will be her monument when the trying times of illness, of hopes raised only to be dashed, are forgotten.
She leaves behind, with happy memories, her husband, her daughter Sylvia and a grandson.
RSA Obituary transcribed from the 1975 RSA Annual Report
