Frank Miles

George Francis 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 the artist in chief of the magazine Life, and between 1877 and 1887 he contributed text and botanical illustrations to The Garden, a weekly journal published in London by William Robinson. Life and career George Miles 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 Ellen (née 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 to 1837 having earlier been elected for Westbury from 1820 to 1826 and Corfe Castle from 1829 to 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 as a friend of Oscar Wilde whom he met at Oxford in 1874 or 1875, where Miles had family connections to the colleges and friends. He 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 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.