Lloyd Mifflin

(American, 1846 - 1921)

Born in Columbia, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Lloyd Mifflin was the son of the portrait and miniature painter John Houston Mifflin (1807 1888), by whom he was first trained. Later, in Philadelphia, his most important teacher was Thomas Moran (1837 1926), with whom he shared a love of landscape painting. After a brief trip to Europe in 1872, when he studied with Herman Herzog in Düsseldorf and sketched along the Rhine. He returned to his family estate, Norwood, in Columbia and continued painting and drawing and also made photographs. Mifflin's favorite subject was his native Susquehanna River and the beauty of its valley; he traveled the entire length of the river in 1871, from Lake Otsego in New York to the Chesapeake Bay, filling his sketchbook along the way and later rendering his sketches into finished paintings. His book Pennsylvania Idyll, published in 1872, contains ten engravings of Susquehanna landscapes after his sketches. Mifflin exhibited paintings at the Union League in Philadelphia (Susquehanna Picnic Party, 1871), the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia (View of Rome, 1876), and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (1880, 1888, and 1889). More recently, View of the Susquehanna, Wrightsville, Pennsylvania was included in the exhibition Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Art in Pennsylvania, organized by the Westmoreland County Museum of Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1959. In 1962, the William Penn Memorial Museum (now the State Museum of Pennsylvania) in Harrisburg acquired several hundred of his works. The most complete source of information on the artist is “Lloyd Mifflin, Pennsylvania Painter and Photographer” by Irwin Richman and Ruth M. Arnold (Antiques, August 1984), pp. 336 45.