Harland Miller valuation

Harland Miller was born in York in 1964, studied at Chelsea, and is a novelist as well as a painter — Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty was published in 2000. The paintings that made his name enlarge the dust jacket of a vintage Penguin paperback to wall scale, faithfully worn and foxed, with the title replaced by a phrase of his own: bleak, funny, usually about disappointment and often naming a northern English town. Later series have used Pelican covers, International Klein Blue, and letterforms treated as abstract painting. He is represented by White Cube.

This market has two clearly separated tiers and they are constantly confused. The unique paintings, in oil on canvas at large scale, lead it. Beneath them is a very large output of editions — screenprints and etchings published in runs of about fifty to three hundred, frequently in several colourways of the same title, and released through timed sales — where colourway, edition size and whether a sheet is signed and numbered in pencil set the value. Fading is the principal condition risk, since the flat colour fields show it immediately.

Miller's first novel, Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty, was published by Fourth Estate in 2000, the same year as a novella about compulsive checking, At First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified. His home city has shown him twice: York Art Gallery opened York, So Good They Named It Once in February 2020, closed early by the pandemic, and XXX in March 2025, for which he gave the gallery three new paintings from the Bad Weather series.

The titles of the Penguin paintings are what identify them, and a print should be described by its title, colourway and edition number exactly as on the sheet.