William Miller
1796–1882 · Scottish line engraver and watercolourist
William Miller (Edinburgh, 1796-1882) was a Scottish line engraver and watercolourist from a Quaker background, best known for the prints he made after the work of J. M. W. Turner. His career reflects the shift from botanical engraving in the early nineteenth century to the reproduction of contemporary British landscape painting.
He was apprenticed to William Archibald in Edinburgh in 1814, and his first published engraving, an apple tree, appeared that same year in the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society's memoirs. After a few years working on his own, he moved to Hackney in 1819 to join the workshop of George Cooke, where he drew plants from the Loddiges nursery for the Botanical Cabinet, published between 1820 and 1822.
From the early 1830s he became one of the principal engravers of Turner. His plates include views of Portsmouth, Clovelly Bay and Comb Martin, along with single prints such as The Grand Canal (1837) and The Rhine, Osterprey and Feltzen (1852). His last engraved work was a set of vignettes after Myles Birket Foster for Thomas Hood's poems, published in 1871 and 1872.
His legacy rests mainly on spreading Turner's art through engraving, and on the Edinburgh workshop that trained pupils such as James Giles.