Miles, George Francis "Frank"

George Francis "Frank" Miles (22 April 1852 - 15 July 1891) was a London-based British artist who specialised in pastel portraits of society ladies, also an architect and a keen plantsman. He was artist in chief to the magazine Life. He was the son of the Rev. Robert Henry William Miles (1818-1883), rector of the Church of St. Mary and All Angels, Bingham, Nottinghamshire, and his wife Mary Cleaver. He was the grandson of Philip John Miles (1773-1845) by his second marriage to Clarissa Peach (1790-1868). Philip John Miles was an English landowner, banker, merchant, politician and collector, who was elected MP for Bristol from 1835 - 1837 having earlier been elected for Westbury from 1820-1826 and Corfe Castle from 1829 - 1832. Frank Miles was therefore brother of Charles Oswald Miles, cousin of Philip Napier Miles and half-cousin of Sir Philip Miles, 2nd Baronet.

Today, Frank Miles is best known for being a friend (and many believe a lover) of Oscar Wilde whom he met at Oxford in 1874 or 1875, where Miles had family connections to the colleges and friends, but was never an undergraduate after being schooled at home (rather than at Eton as his father and uncles were). Miles introduced Wilde to Lillie Langtry, and to his friend and patron Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, who later became the model for the worldly Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

If rumours of this relationship being physical are true, then Miles must have been bisexual as he was well known for his interest in women as well, both "society ladies" with whom he associated through his family connections and the working class girls he often used for his models. In the year leading up to his final illness, Miles was engaged to be married to Miss Gratiana Lucy Hughes (known as Lucy), daughter of Alfred Hughes (later Sir Alfred Hughes, 10th Baronet), of East Bergholt Lodge, Suffolk, but his incarceration led to this falling through. In 1887, Miles was committed to Brislington House, an asylum near Bristol, and he died in 1891 of what was diagnosed as 'general paralysis of the insane (4 years), exhaustion and pneumonia. After being depleted by paying his medical care at the asylum, on his death, the remaining possessions of a once-wealthy man with a large inheritance and a successful artistic career were found to be worth only

Created 2015-10-29 by Anna St.Onge.

http://viaf.org/viaf/96306497 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Miles