Lewis Miller was a Pennsylvania German carpenter who witnessed the era of the early American republic, through the civil war, to the Centennial. He traveled through America and Europe, chiefly afoot and mainly en route he created a huge body of textual and graphic work. Almost two thousand of Miller’s commented drawings are kept in various American collections, the Historical Society of York, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Virginia Historical Society.

Lewis Miller, from: D. A. Shelley: Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles. The Reflections of a Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania German Folk Artist, York, PA, 1966

His biographer Donald A. Shelley claimed that Miller’s oeuvre was “one of the greatest and most complete pictorial records of an era ever created by man.” (D. A. Shelley: Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles. The Reflections of a Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania German Folk Artist, York, PA, 1966) Shelley esteemed Miller´s drawings for “their realistic accuracy” and for “their value to the historian from a purely documentary point of view.”

Lewis Miller, A View of Worms, from: D. A. Shelley: Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles. The Reflections of a Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania German Folk Artist, York, PA, 1966

Lewis Miller, The German Reformed Church, from: D. A. Shelley: Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles. The Reflections of a Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania German Folk Artist, York, PA, 1966

The current edition of the scholary online magazine Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide has a very interesting multi-faceted study of Miller´s “Guide to Central Park”, an album of fifty-four pages of ink and watercolor drawings, which he created perhaps in the 1860s, in the course of the Civil War. “In the Park”: Lewis Miller’s Chronicle of American Landscape at Mid-Century” consists of three contributions: A full, annotated, digital facsimile of the album, which is kept in the collection of the Henry Ford Museum in York, PA, an article by Therese O’Malley on Lewis Miller’s View of American Landscape, that detects the influences of the wood engraved pictorial press culture in Miller´s work, furthermore an essay by Kathryn R. Barush, A Pilgrim in the Park, that explores the spiritual implications of Miller´s work as an artist, and finally a map, that links the features he depicted in Central Park to their current locations.

Lewis Miller, Swedenborg (Coll. of the York Country Heritage Trust, York PA.)

Lewis Miller, Guide to Central Park (Coll. The Henry Ford, Dearborn, MI.)