Sally Miller

Sally Miller was born in 1782 in Middletown, Connecticut, and enrolled at the Litchfield Female Academy in 1811. The academy, founded by Sarah Pierce in 1792, was one of the few institutions in the early United States that offered both academic and ornamental instruction to young women. While there, Miller produced a painted silk mourning picture now titled Memorial painting.

Executed in watercolor and ink on silk, the work measures 28 by 32 3/8 inches and depicts mourners gathered near a memorial monument beneath a weeping willow, imagery typical of the deeply conventionalized mourning pictures produced in early nineteenth-century America. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the piece in 1948 through the Rogers Fund and holds it as object number 48.81. Curators have identified Miller's work as one of eight nearly identical mourning pictures known to have originated at the Litchfield Female Academy; all share the same size, composition, and coloring, and the painted faces in each appear to have been completed by a single hand, possibly that of Flora Catlin, an art instructor at the school from 1815 to 1831.

These objects reflect the academy's emphasis on needlework, music, and painting as feminine accomplishments, skills that served as markers of genteel education. Beyond her attendance at the academy and this surviving work, little else is documented of Miller's life or further artistic output.