Alfred Jacob Miller (1810-1874) 
Indians in Pursuit 
Watercolor on paper 
Sight size:  8 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches 
Framed size:  16 x 19 inches 
Signed lower right 
c. 1838 

     Alfred Jacob Miller was one of the earliest professionally trained American artists to journey across the Great Plains and document the landscapes, peoples, and customs of the American West. Born in Baltimore on January 2, 1810, to George Washington Miller and Harriet Jacob, Miller studied art in Paris and Rome in 1833 before returning to Baltimore, where he established a studio. Following the deaths of his parents, he relocated to New Orleans in the spring of 1837, where he encountered the figure who would profoundly shape the course of his career: Capt. William Drummond Stewart.
   
     Stewart, the second son of Scottish nobility, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, sportsman, and experienced traveler, had attended several gatherings of fur trappers and traders at the annual Rocky Mountain rendezvous. Believing that his planned 1837 journey might be his final western expedition, Stewart commissioned the young Miller to accompany him and create a visual record of the adventure.
    
    Miller arrived in St. Louis in April 1837, where he met with Gov. William Clark, famed explorer and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and studied Clark’s museum collections in preparation for the expedition. In May, Miller and Stewart departed from Westport with a company of forty-five men and forty-five carts carrying trade goods intended for exchange at the rendezvous. Traveling along the Kansas, Little Blue, and Platte Rivers, the expedition followed the North Fork of the Platte River past landmarks including Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, and Fort Laramie. Miller captured these scenes, as well as Independence Rock, Devils Gate, Split Rock, and the Continental Divide, in a series of vivid watercolor sketches.
     
    The party eventually reached Horse Creek in the Wind River Mountains, the site of the 1837 rendezvous, where trappers, traders, and Native peoples gathered. Miller remained there for approximately three weeks before accompanying Stewart on a hunting excursion in the mountains. He then returned to New Orleans to begin transforming his field sketches into finished works commissioned by Stewart.

     During the journey, Miller created dozens of studies that served as the foundation for his later paintings. He first assembled an album of eighty-seven wash and watercolor sketches for Stewart, followed by a series of large oil paintings intended to decorate Stewart’s family estate, Murthly Castle, in Scotland. Eighteen of these paintings were exhibited at the Apollo Gallery in New York in 1839 before being sent overseas. Miller later accepted Stewart’s invitation to continue working at Murthly, where he spent approximately a year producing western and religious subjects.

     After returning to Baltimore in 1842, Miller continued to rely on his 1837 western sketches for inspiration and commissions. Among his most significant patrons was William T. Walters, who commissioned approximately 200 watercolors between 1858 and 1860. Miller’s western scenes were also reproduced through chromolithography in Charles Wilkins Weber’s publications, including The Hunter-Naturalist: Romance of Sporting; or, Wild Scenes and Wild Hunters and The Hunter-Naturalist: Wild Scenes and Song-Birds.

     Miller’s vision of the West reflected the ideals of the Romantic era, portraying Native peoples encountered at the rendezvous as noble figures and the western landscape as an expansive, pristine wilderness. Although he made only one journey west, the sketches and observations from that expedition sustained his artistic career for decades. Today, major collections of Miller’s work are held by the Joslyn Art Museum, The Walters Art Museum, and Gilcrease Museum.  His works remain among the most important visual records of the early nineteenth-century American West.