Robert Alexander Darrah Miller was born in Philadelphia in 1905 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1923-1927, where he became good friends with Robert Hogue.  Both artists studied under Daniel Garber at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.  He married Celia Belden Marshall, daughter of George Marshall, the physician who sold the Phillips Mill property to William L. Lathrop.  In 1928 they moved to Bucks County, where he painted the landscape, along with portraits,and still lifes and in 1932 a mural with Thomas Hart Benton.  While Miller initially worked in an impressionist style, his paintings gradually embraced the newer modernist aesthetic.

 Miller participated in several important exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1934, Pennsylvania Academy in 1942, and a one-man show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1950.  He is also in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, University of Pennsylvania, Reading Museum, and murals at the Stockton Inn, New Jersey.   

 In our painting Hilltop Barns, Miller has depicted a group of smaller and larger barns placed at the top of a small hill.  It is a beautiful landscape scene, sparkling with color and light that celebrates the serene and rustic countryside.  This piece is a prime example of how Miller used the new modernist aesthetics of his time.  His color became less rooted in nature and more in his imagination.  The flattened, simplified shapes and decorative surface patterns as well as the imaginative colors  point toward this transition.  At the bottom of the small hill, leading up to the barns, we find to large bushes, one on each side of the canvas. The paint is deliciously thick, and the lush yellows of the bushes with the afternoon sun that is falling on them add to the overall glow of this piece.  As the viewer’s eye moves up toward the barns, set against an almost crystal blue sky, we notice how the shapes become simplified.  The red barns interspersed amongst each other, with their smooth red surfaces stand proudly at the top of the hill.  The sky, held in a curtain of sparkling blue colors, provide a brilliant contrast to the warm feel of the barns and the summer green grass unfolding in front of them.