​J. N. BARTFIELD GALLERIES

In New Orleans in the year 1836, Alfred Jacob Miller met Captain William Drummond Stewart, an officer in the British Army and a Scottish peer. Something about the young artist’s work or manner, or both, must have caught Stewart’s attention because he quite quickly hired Miller to accompany him as the official artist for his expedition to the Rocky Mountains, which set out in 1837. After the end of the expedition, Miller traveled to Scotland in 1840 and remained there for two years, transforming his sketches—some of the only first hand depictions of the Fur Trade Era in the American West—into oils for Stewart’s Scottish castle. On his return to the States, Miller settled in his native Baltimore and made a career out of selling oil paintings based on his travels. Miller’s style is inimitable and romantic, but the scenes he sketched and painted spring directly from his experiences in the Rocky Mountains.