American Art Collaborative

"In looking at the ruins about Rome, the spectator cannot fail of being sensibly impressed with the old, very old look of the buildings and remains of man's handiwork. The stones even of which they are compsed seem to be litterally honey-combed with the storms of centuries, that have battled and beat against them. How different with these Lakes and Mountains;- although they have been in existence thousands of years, what a freshness and newness rests over them,- they are veriably the same yesterday, to-day, and forever to all appearances. The scene in the sketch presents a broad sheet of water,- and the foreground wild and broken;- with a solitary horseman climbing the hill from the valley below;- lofty promontories flank the sides; carrying the eye to a noble line of mountains in the distance, broken against the sky with spurs & pinnacles." A.J. Miller, extracted from "The West of Alfred Jacob Miller" (1837). In July 1858 William T. Walters commissioned 200 watercolors at twelve dollars apiece from Baltimore born artist Alfred Jacob Miller. These paintings were each accompanied by a descriptive text, and were delivered in installments over the next twenty-one months and ultimately were bound in three albums. Transcriptions of field-sketches drawn during the 1837 expedition that Miller had undertaken to the annual fur-trader's rendezvous in the Green River Valley (in what is now western Wyoming), these watercolors are a unique record of the closing years of the western fur trade.