Addison Thomas Millar
Addison Thomas Millar (October 4, 1860 – September 8, 1913) was an American painter known for his everyday genre scenes and Orientalist works. He was born in Bazetta Township, Ohio, to William H. Millar and Permelia Kennedy Millar. His father had come to the United States from Scotland. Millar grew up in Warren, Ohio, and as a child he took painting lessons from local landscape painter John Bell.
In his teens, Millar won three yearly art prizes from The Youth's Companion, which encouraged his education. His parents allowed him to study in Cincinnati with the genre painter De Scott Evans. He then worked as a portrait painter in Cleveland. By 1883 he had moved to New York City, where he studied at the Art Students League and later attended the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art with William Merritt Chase.
In 1894 Millar went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian with Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Giovanni Boldini. He remained in Europe for several years, traveling and painting. In 1895, during a trip to Algiers with Chase, he found inspiration for many of his best-known works.
Millar exhibited widely in the United States, with shows in Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago. He was a member of the Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design. He and his wife were killed when an express train crashed into their car in South Norwalk, Connecticut.
His works are held by major institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, as well as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Library of Congress and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2011, an auction in Connecticut sold his Rue du Sphinx, Algiers for $7,200.
When Mike and Karen Pence moved into the Vice-President’s Residence, they borrowed several landscapes by American artists from Smithsonian archives, including Millar’s The Waterfall.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 10:05 (CET).