Ruth Milles (1873 - 1941)

Ruth Miles is a multi-faceted Swedish artist: sculptor, ceramist, illustrator and poet. She is the daughter of a Lieutenant.

She studied at the Stockholm Technical School in 1892 and 1893 and then at the Royal Academy of Art from 1894 to 1898. During this time her brother Carl studied sculpture in Paris, where he was a pupil of Auguste Rodin. Ruth went to join him and together they founded a company in Paris to sell their work, which consisted of various fairy-tale characters, of which she was the author, and children in the form of small bronze sculptures. She also worked in ceramics. At that time, they went on holiday to St Briac on the north coast of Brittany. There, Ruth depicted the life of the seafarers in her writings as well as in her work as a sculptor. In 1902 she received a special prize at the Salon des Artistes Français.

Ruth's artistic life was inseparable from that of her brother Carl. In 1903 they both returned to Sweden with tuberculosis, where they again shared a studio and received numerous commissions from Stockholm's cultural institutions. In 1932, she left her native Sweden and moved to Rome, where she died in 1941 from her illness.