Alfred Jacob Miller

born Baltimore, Maryland, 1810; died Baltimore, Maryland, 1874

BiographyBaltimore-born Alfred Jacob Miller trained with artist Thomas Sully in Philadelphia from 1831 to 1832 before traveling to Paris to study at the École de Beaux-Arts and then on to the English Life School in Rome. After opening his studio in New Orleans in 1837, Miller was hired by Scottish Captain William Drummond Stewart to record his adventures. The artist traveled with Stewart’s party along what would become the Oregon Trail to the mountain man rendezvous at the base of the Wind River Mountains in present-day Wyoming. Along the journey Miller sketched idyllic scenes of fur trappers living in harmony with both nature and Native Americans. These images would later help create a romanticized conception of the mountain man as the “Anglo-Savage” living in close contact with nature. Miller returned from the rendezvous in 1838 and eventually joined Stewart at his home in Scotland, where he completed 18 large-scale oil paintings and some 200 smaller watercolors from his sketches. He spent the rest of his life creating works based on his only trip into the West, and died in Baltimore in 1874.

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