Pippa Miller, 101; War Artist (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
Lover of the Norfolk Broads who painted the effects of
Baedeker raids on Norwich
Ian Collins
Monday May 29, 2006
The Guardian
The artist Philippa "Pippa" Miller, who has died aged 101,
enjoyed belated celebrity in her adopted city of Norwich,
with two crowd-pulling exhibitions in the cathedral in her
centenary year.
The first of those shows, in January 2005, was An Artist's
War, and it charted her greatest legacy - a painfully
precise documentary record of the city's bomb damage.
Norwich was a target in 1942 during the "Baedeker raids" on
towns of particular architectural glory, but Miller showed
that the brunt of the destruction was borne in humdrum
terraces and suburban avenues. Her matter-of-fact images,
created on-the-spot within hours of each attack, and now
bequeathed to the Norwich Castle Museum, are intensely
poignant. Her second exhibition, in August 2005, was An
Artist's Broadland.
She had moved to Norwich after attending Lowestoft School of
Art, to teach, from 1930, at what is now the Blyth-Jex
comprehensive school. But, while for decades she worked as
an art and craft teacher in an urban setting, her heart
remained in the open waterways of the Norfolk and Suffolk
Broads - as the fluid, celebratory watercolours of her
second cathedral show last year revealed.
Born in Oulton Broad, Pippa's father, Fredrick, built yachts
and cruisers and, in 1908, a prototype hydroplane for
Lowestoft's Brooke Marine. Later he would turn a former
Thames barge, Pauline, into a floating hotel. Like other
East Anglian boat-building families, the Millers took to the
water each September, Pippa joining her parents in a
converted wherry to paint the unfolding scenes. Soon,
literally and metaphorically, she was sailing her own craft.
She loved, as she wrote in 1923, every breath of Broadland.
She would get up at sunrise and, after sailing all day,
would moor up on some remote bank each evening to paint.
"What a subject for an artist!" she wrote. "A riot of
colour, all gold and red, lighting the dusky blue of the sky
and tingeing fairy wisps of cloud into a melody of flame."
Her prewar memoir, published last year in the catalogue for
An Artist's Broadland, described the "vast and almost
unending flatness of lonely marsh, swept and torn with rain,
the monotony relieved by windmills with fast-twirling sails
and by clusters of willows striving with all their might to
keep their blue-grey coats from tearing into even tinier
shreds than they already are, looking lonely, bleak and
wild.
"Imagine yourself, warmly clad, a tiller in one hand, a
straining rope in the other, and your back and feet jammed
hard against the combings of a sturdy little yacht. Her
sails are full to the utmost and her mast and halyards creak
as you speed along the narrow winding reaches of the River
Chet, drawing from muddy creeks the water in your wake with
a swish and a plop.
"Then at a bend you perform the necessary quick hauling to
save a gybe, and possibly a broken spar, ease over and race
on again close-hauled, balancing yourself at a precarious
angle on the windward deck, now high out of the water, now
low during a momentary lull.
"Soon the rain ceases and the sun bursts through: soft
clouds are hurrying across the sky, causing gleams of
sunlight to race over the marshes, fearful lest other gleams
should catch them. On you speed, past sleepy hamlets and
old-world inns, where ancient ferry boats still ply from
quay to quay.
"Before you now is the promise of a glorious sunset, an
expanse of wind-blown clouds low on the horizon. The breeze
is lessening and your course altered as you swerve into the
main stream to make your moorings for the night."
In 1929 Lowestoft -"Land of the Rising Sun and Gateway of
the Broads" - prepared for a bumper tourist season by
printing 40,000 copies of a town guide, with a Pippa Miller
painting on the cover. That teeming scene is now a classic
image of the prewar seaside holiday and a resort in its
prime.
She made witty model sculptures, and continued to delight in
painting, walking and sailing across her beloved Broadland,
until well into her 90s. An amateur artist in the best sense
of the phrase, Pippa Miller has left a dedicated record of a
happy life exploring East Anglia's lost watery wilderness.
It is rather ironic that she will be best remembered as an
unofficial war artist of wrecked city streets.
· Philippa Ruth Miller, artist, born January 10 1905; died
May 16 2006
Bill Schenley
> celebrity in her adopted city of Norwich, with two crowd-pulling
> exhibitions in the cathedral in her centenary year.
Maybe because her cache of paintings was not really discovered until she was
in her 90s.
http://www.cathedral.org.uk/acatalog/Art_Catalogues.html
Her photo on page 7:
http://www.barchester.com/daily_life/pdf/issue17/pp24_37.pdf
Pretty nifty story, 'tho ...
aka Bob
magnanimously proffered:
Excellent obit and follow-up story. I really enjoy learning about
people of substance and grit. Helps to make up for the scum like
General García.
---
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
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Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
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