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Vol. 26:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 1998
Lillian B. Miller
Lillian B. Miller, editor of the Peale Family Papers and Historian of American Culture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, died on November 27, 1997. She was 74. Among the projects on which she was working at the time of her death was Volume 5 of the Peale Family Papers, Charles Willson Peale's autobiography.
A 1943 graduate of Radcliffe College, she undertook graduate studies at Columbia University, from which she received her master's degree in 1948 and her doctorate in 1962. Her dissertation was published as Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of Fine Arts in the United States, 1790-1860 (1966), which became the standard monograph on the early history of art institutions in this country. At her death, she was preparing a sequel, to be entitled The Hereditary Tradition: Artistic Taste and Collections in the United States, 1860-1920.
Dr. Miller taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland at College Park. She served as Historian of the National Portrait Gallery from 1971 to 1974, and in that capacity was responsible for organizing the Gallery's exhibitions celebrating the bicentennial of the American Revolution, In the Minds and Hearts of the People and The Dye Is Now Cast. In 1974, she organized the Peale Family Papers project. Under her editorship appeared a microfiche edition entitled The Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family and four volumes of a projected seven-volume letterpress edition entitled The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family.
Her primary interest was in the history of the dissemination of knowledge and culture in the United States. She took an active part in professional organizations that promoted the study of American history and culture, serving on the councils or boards of, among others, the Commonwealth Center for the Study of American Culture, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the American Studies Association, and the American Antiquarian Society.
