OBITUARY

This famous engraver, who died on the 20th ult. while on a visit to Sheffield, was in his eighty-sixth year, having been born at Edinburgh on the 28th May 1796.

In youth  he displayed a taste for Art, and after studying in London under the celebrated engraver, Mr G Cooke, he returned to his native place, and soon acquired a reputation as a line engraver, being specially noted for his reproductions in black-and-white of the works of JMW Turner, RA.

He also executed a large number of illustrations for Turner's England and Wales and for the works of Scott, Campbell, Rogers and others.

The greater part of his work was of course done at a period already remote, but within the last ten years he executed a series of vignette illustrations from Birket Foster for Hood's Poems.

Turner always held Mr Miller's engravings in the highest esteem, and Ruskin has said that on the whole he was the best engraver after that great artist. 

Writing in Ariadne Florentina of the Frontispiece of Roger's Poems, Ruskin says that the first vignette of the garden, with the cut hedges and fountain is so consummate in its use of every possible artifice of delicate line, that he thinks it cannot but with some of its companions survive the refuse of its school and become classic.

Mr Miller who lived chiefly in Edinburgh, was a member of the Society of Friends, and amongst a large circle of acquaintances was no less loved for his genial and kindly disposition , than admired for his artistic talents.

He was twice married and leaves a widow, a son, and three daughters. 

Our portrait is from a photograph by JG Tunny, 13, Maitland Street, Edinburgh.

[Obituary:  The Graphic, 25 February 1882]