Encampment on Green River

Alfred Jacob Miller painted the fur trade era of the American West: trappers, Native American hunters, buffalo, camps and the great summer rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains. His scenes are romantic, warm in colour and full of movement. Born in Baltimore, he studied in Paris and Rome in the early 1830s. In 1837 the Scottish adventurer Sir William Drummond Stewart hired him to record a journey to the fur traders’ rendezvous on the Green River in present day Wyoming. Miller was one of the first artists to see and paint the region, and he spent much of his later career in Baltimore turning his sketches into finished paintings for collectors. The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore holds a large series of his western watercolours. In Attack by Crow Indians and Antoine Clement, The Great Hunter, look at the energy of horses and riders and the wide, golden western light.