Peter Miller, born Henrietta Myers (1913-1996), was an American Surrealist painter. Myers took an interest in art at a very early age and, upon graduating from the Arlington Hall Junior School for Women, Washington, she applied to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. On her application form, she wrote that she wanted to study art because she "would rather fail at painting than succeed at anything else." It was while at the Academy that Henrietta met her future husband, C. Earle Miller, who studied sculpture and printmaking. In 1934, during their final year at the Academy, they travelled to Paris for the first time. At the introduction of Arthur Beecher Carles - with whom Myers received private lessons in painting - they met with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and, most notably, Joan Miró, the great Catalan Surrealist painter whose work would have a profound influence on her throughout the 1930s and beyond. In 1935, the artist began using the name "Peter Miller," for she felt collectors and critics would take her paintings more seriously if she were identified as male.

Miller is increasingly being recognised as a pioneering American Modernist. The artist held solo exhibitions at the prestigious Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1944 and 1945; a gallery that was at the time the premiere showcase for Surrealist painting in America, with exhibitors including Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Frida Kahlo. After Miller's first show ended, Louise Bourgeois sent her a press clipping from the Art Digest, wherein the reviewer, a critic named Margaret Breuning, summarised her work as a 'translation of fantasy and symbolism'.

At this time Miller was also included in The Women, one of the most seminal surveys of women artists held at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery, New York, in June of 1945. She was one of thirty-one artists selected, and appeared alongside other female painters and sculptors who would become prominent in the years to come, including Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo. Although Miller received a great deal of critical acclaim from these shows, she slowly withdrew from the New York art world, preferring instead to spend more time communing with nature at her homes in Pennsylvania and New Mexico. In 1935, Miller and her husband bought five-thousand acres of land in Española, near Sante Fe, and built a ranch for themselves to live. This land adjoined the San Ildefonso Reservation, and set in motion an intimate, lifelong relationship between Miller and the indigenous people of Tewa Pueblo. The cultural tradition, crafts, and religious beliefs of the Tewa inspired her, and Miller witnessed many performances and rituals that were closed to visitors outside of the Pueblo community.

The Afterlife is an extraordinary example of Miller's work. It belongs to a series of works the artist produced in the mid-1930's that contain flat but colourful organic shapes floating against an opaque, ethereal ground. Here, Miller presents two amorphic figures, their faces simultaneously presented from different vantage points, in the manner of Picasso's Cubist portraits. They appear against a monochromatic but richly textured landscape of pure pictorial space. The painting is radical and unconstrained, recalling works that Miró painted from his family's farm in Montroig, Catalonia, such as The Birth of the World, now in the collection of the MoMA, New York. The Afterlife also evokes the atmospheric and ethereal landscapes of Yves Tanguy or Arshile Gorky - who was showing in this same period with Julien Levy - while saliently absorbing lessons Miller learned from Native American painting, particularly in the way that she defines relationships between shapes in strange, undefined spaces.

Furthermore, the technique of the painting is highly distinctive. Miller textures the ground of the canvas in areas as if to mimic crayon walls, while in others she builds up the paint, with layer upon layer of different colour, before using sgraffito to reveal glimpses of the hidden hues beneath. These complex techniques, paired with Miller's innate and sophisticated sense of colour, gives her painting a quiet and eerily spiritual quality.