American Art Collaborative

In the spring of 1837, Captain William Drummond Stewart hired the Baltimorean Alfred Jacob Miller to accompany and record an expedition to the annual fur traders' rendezvous held in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in what is now Wyoming. That autumn, the artist returned east with sketches and watercolors, which served as the basis for later paintings. Miller observed that Americans could find in their own country "a race of men equal in form and grace (if not superior) to the finest ideal ever dreamed of by the Greeks." With the financial assistance of Baltimore collector Robert Gilmor, Jr., Miller studied in Europe in 1832-33, where he was attracted to the works of the Romantic artists, particularly Decamps and Delacroix, as well as to paintings he saw in the Louvre Museum by Dutch 17th-century masters.