Hugh Miller Watching for his Father’s Vessel, 1860. Etching on steel in black ink on paper, 213/16 x 67/16 inches (7.2 x 16.3 cm) – image size. Private collection.. [Complete plate]. Click on image to enlarge it.
This etching shows Hugh Miller as a boy lying on a grassy protuberance of the coastline behind his mother’s house and looking out over the sea hoping to catch site of his father’s sloop. His father was lost at sea and Hugh was brought up by his mother and uncles. Hugh Miller later became a well-known Scottish geologist and paleontologist. Miller in his book My Schools and School Masters recalled: “I used to climb day after day a grassy protuberance of the old coast-line immediately behind my mother’s house, and to look wistfully out long after everyone else had ceased to hope for the sloop with the two stripes of white and the two square top-sails I never saw.” A watercolour version of this subject is in the collection of the Oxford Brookes University, Oxford.
Bibliography
Miller, Hugh: My School and School Masters; Or, the Story of My Education. Gould and Lincoln, 1854.
Last modified 23 March 2022