ArtistSwedish
Ruth Milles
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Ruth Anna Maria Milles was born on 19 April 1873 at Örby Manor in Vallentuna, outside Stockholm, the elder sister of sculptor Carl Milles. She trained at the Tekniska Skolan in Stockholm from 1892 to 1893, then continued at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts from 1894 to 1898, where she was considered advanced enough to skip a year. In the autumn of 1898 she left for Paris, roughly a year after her brother had settled there.
In Paris, Milles studied at the Académie Colarossi and at the École des Beaux-Arts. She and Carl formed a small joint company selling bronze figurines of children and fairy-tale characters, a collaboration that was as much economic as creative. In 1902 she received an honorary award at the Salon in Paris. Over the following decade and a half she participated in international exhibitions in St. Louis (1905), Buenos Aires (1910), Rome (1911), the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (1915), and the Swedish art exhibition at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition in Copenhagen (1916), collecting silver medals along the way.
Her best-known works are small-scale bronze and ceramic figures modelled on people she observed in the Breton fishing village of Saint-Briac: pieces such as Bukettlisa, Flitiga Kajsa, Mjölkflicka, and Mormodern. She also received institutional commissions in Stockholm, producing medallions and busts for the Royal Dramatic Theatre, including portraits of singer Jenny Lind and actor Georg Dahlqvist. Her relief Efter väntan på havsstranden (1907) was acquired by the Nationalmuseum in 1908, only the second work by a female sculptor to enter that collection. Her work is also held at the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm, and the Musée Camille Claudel in France has featured her work in its programme.
Failing health eventually forced her to give up sculpture, and she turned first to painting and later to writing. In 1932 she moved permanently to Rome, where she died on 11 February 1941. She is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
At auction, Milles appears primarily at Swedish houses. All 17 items in the Auctionist database are catalogued as sculpture, offered through Crafoord Auktioner Stockholm, Bukowskis Stockholm, Metropol, and Auktionshuset Kolonn, among others. A bronze female figure dated 1909 is the top recorded sale at 61,000 SEK, and a bronze Flitiga Kajsa has reached 18,700 EUR, confirming steady collector interest in her figurative bronzes.