Ferdinand Von Miller

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Ferdinand Von Miller (born Furstenfeldbruck, 1813; died Munich, 1887) was a metal worker who worked for the development of the craft of bronze founding.

After a sojourn at the academy and a preliminary engagement at the royal brass foundry, he went to Paris in 1833, where he learnt from Soyer and Blus the varied technique necessary for the manipulation of bronze. He also visited England and the Netherlands, and after his return worked under his teacher and uncle Stiglmayr, whom the Crown Prince Ludwig had induced to devote himself to bronze foundry work and to the establishment of the Munich foundry as a state institution. Miller soon took his uncle's place, and upon the death of the latter was appointed inspector of the workshop. He soon won for it a worldwide reputation, and for himself a fortune and position of influence.

The casting of the Bavaria statue (1844-55) especially brought him fame. Commissions came to him from far and near. Thus he cast not merely the statues of Herder, Goethe, and Schiller for Weimar, but also the figures of Duke Eberhard in Stuttgart, of Berzelius in Stockholm and two Washington monuments by Mills and Crawford in Boston and Richmond, Virginia. The gate of the Capitol in Washington is also by him. The Munich exhibition of art and crafts in the year 1876 was reportedly largely Miller's work. Two years before he had been elected to the directorate of the society of art industries. He sought to win over artists to a general exhibition of German art in alliance with handicrafts. Drawing rooms, cabinets, boudoirs, sitting rooms and chapels were arranged so as to form in their grouping a whole by having art and trade appliances put into the place for which they were intended. Where this was not possible, a partition or a wall would be placed with picturesque effect in some adjoining room. Miller forthwith established a center of exhibition and sale for the society, and procured himself a home especially for the social intercourse of artists and art craftsmen.

In 1840 he married Anna Pösl (1815-1890), the daughter of the Chancellor of the regional government of Landshut, who bore him 14 children. His son, Ferdinand Miller junior, followed in his father's footsteps, and is known in America for the figures on the Sinton fountain in Cincinnati (at the unveiling of which he was honoured), as well as by the statues of Shakespeare and Alexander von Humboldt in St. Louis, Missouri and finally by the war memorial in Charleston. His son Oskar von Miller became an engineer and founder of the Deutsches Museum.

[edit] Sources

• Pecht, Gesch. der Munchener Kunst (Munich, 1888);
• Moller, Univsrsalhandbuck von Munchen;
• This article incorporates text from the entry Ferdinand Von Miller in the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.