Alfred Jacob Miller 1810 - 1874

Eugenia Miller Whyte (the artist's niece) or Louisa Whyte Norton (the artist's grandniece)
The Old Print Shop, New York, 1947
The Boatman's National Bank, St. Louis, Missouri (now Bank of America), 1947 (acquired from the above)

Kansas City, Missouri, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Alfred Jacob Miller: Romancing the West in the Bank of America Collection, September 2010-September 2011, no. 30, illustrated in color on the cover, pp. 132, 134, illustrated in color p. 135 

Mary Bartlett Cowdrey and Helen Comstock, "Alfred Jacob Miller and the Farthest West," Panorama, vol. 3, no. 1, August-September 1947, p. 1
Ron Tyler ed., Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist on the Oregon Trail, Fort Worth, Texas, 1982, no. 379E, p. 325

This work is in very good condition. The paper is hinged at the upper left and upper right corners, and there is one tiny accretion located in the lower left quadrant. For a more detailed condition report prepared by Julius Lowy Frame and Restoring Company, Inc., please contact the American Art department at (212) 606-7280.
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For the majority of his career, Alfred Jacob Miller lived and worked in Baltimore. The majority of his artistic success, however, can be traced to his nearly six month long expedition West in 1837. William Drummond Stewart, a retired Captain of the British army and Scottish nobleman, invited Miller to accompany him as the commissioned artist on a trip to the Rocky Mountains, where they traveled on what would become the Oregon Trail. Though Miller's journey with Stewart was the only journey he made to the West, the sketches he produced and images he observed would serve as the primary inspiration for his subsequent work throughout the remainder of his career.

Miller executed some 100 watercolor and pen-and-ink sketches during this expedition, which he later reworked into finished watercolors and oils for a variety of patrons. While Karl Bodmer and George Catlin were the first artists to travel west, neither of them ranged as far as Miller or captured his distinct scenes. Depicting his daily impressions of this vast and unfamiliar environment, the works Miller produced showcase his inimitable ability to render the idyllic—but vanishing—wilderness and people he encountered, and reveal the romanticism and enthusiasm with which he viewed the American West.