Biography by Moira Armstrong

Francis Davis Millet was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. on November 3, 1848. He joined the military at age 15 and was part of the Union Army in the Civil War, serving as a drummer and an assistant to his father, a surgeon.

After the war, he attended Harvard, where he earned a Master of Arts. He then worked in the newspaper business, as a reporter and editor for the Boston Courier and a correspondent for the Advertiser, covering the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He simultaneously pursued art, painting murals in Boston with artist John LaFarge. He then attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium, winning several student awards for his work.

Abroad, he also maintained his career in news, working as a war correspondent for the New York Herald, the London Daily News, and the London Graphic covering the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. He also contributed as a surgeon's assistant in the war and received awards from Russia and Romania for his service.

Millet returned to the United States in the 1880s and joined several prestigious arts associations, including the Society of American Artists, the National Academy of Design, and the Fine Arts Committee. He was also appointed as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an advisory committee member of the National Gallery of Art, a founding member and secretary of the American Academy in Rome, a founding member and vice chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. He also helped found the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and helped bring Emil Otto Grundmann to head the school.

He served as the decorations director for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. His work on this exposition was so successful that he later served as a juror, administrator, mural painter, decorator, and advisor at world's fairs in Vienna, Chicago, Paris, and Tokyo. He also designed the 1907 Civil War Medal and 1908 Spanish Campaign Medal for the U.S. military.

As a writer and journalist, he translated Tolstoy and wrote essays and short stories, most notably Capillary Crime and Other Stories (1892), The Danube From the Black Forest to the Black Sea (1892), and Expedition to the Philippines (1899).

Millet married Elizabeth Greely Merrill, known as Lily, in 1879 in Paris, France. His close friends Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Mark Twain attended his wedding. Millet and Lily had four children: Kate, Edwin, Laurence, and John. Kate was often a model for the artist John Singer Sargent. However, he also shared a home with Archibald Butt in Washington, D.C., where the two threw large parties attended by Congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and President William Howard Taft. Millet's relationship with Butt has been interpreted as homosexual by some historians.

Millet and Butt traveled together on the Titanic in 1912, departing from Cherbourg, France. Millet was last seen helping women and children board lifeboats. His body was recovered by the Mackay-Bennett, a boat laying cable in the Atlantic that recovered many of the deceased from the Titanic, and he was buried in Central Cemetery in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts.