Background
Von Miller was born in Fürstenfeldbruck.
engineer metallurgist sculptor
Von Miller was born in Fürstenfeldbruck.
He also visited England and the Netherlands, and after his return to Munich 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.
After a sojourn at the academy in Munich and a preliminary engagement at the royal brass foundry, Miller traveled to Paris in 1833, where he learnt from Soyer and Blus the varied technique necessary for bronze working. Miller soon took his uncle"s place, and upon the death of the latter was appointed inspector of the workshop. The casting of the Bavaria statue (1844-1855) especially brought him fame.
Commissions came to him from far and near.
He cast the statue of Herder, and the double statue of Goethe and Schiller, for Weimar, and also the figures of Duke Eberhard in Stuttgart, of Berzelius in Stockholm and two Washington monuments, by Mills in Boston and Crawford in Richmond, Virginia. He also cast the gate of the Capitol in Washington.
In 1874 Miller was elected to the directorate of the society of art industries. The Munich exhibition of art and crafts in 1876 was reportedly largely Miller"s work.
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 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. He died in Munich, and was buried in the Alter Südfriedhof in the same city.
Ferdinand von Miller"s son Ferdinand (1842–1929) followed in his father"s footsteps and is known in the United States for some of the figures on the Tyler Davidson Fountain in Cincinnati (at the unveiling on October 6, 1871, at which he was honored).
He also created the statues of Shakespeare, Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt in Tower Grove Park of Saint Louis and of J. Marion Sims in New New York