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Source Description

Extracts from Alfred Jacob Miller’s original text, which accompanied his images of Native Americans, are included below for reference. By the time Miller saw the fur trade, several famous personalities were involved, such as Jim Bridger, "Bourgeois" Walker, and Kit Carson. Of that group, it is interesting to note, Miller painted a portrait only of Walker. There are various other portraits of members of Stewart's group, such as Pierre, a seventeen-year old French Canadian and one of Miller's favorites. Dressed here in his buckskin shirt, his hat decorated with turkey feathers and a fox-tail brush, and holding his treasured pipe, Pierre is apparently deep in thought. -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.

Scholar Source Context

Document identity
localId
17669
label
Pierre
core
obj
dtoType
drawing
pageCount
1
Source metadata
id
17669
contentType
drawing
stage
normalized
title
Pierre
description
Extracts from Alfred Jacob Miller’s original text, which accompanied his images of Native Americans, are included below for reference. By the time Miller saw the fur trade, several famous personalities were involved, such as Jim Bridger, "Bourgeois" Walker, and Kit Carson. Of that group, it is interesting to note, Miller painted a portrait only of Walker. There are various other portraits of members of Stewart's group, such as Pierre, a seventeen-year old French Canadian and one of Miller's favorites. Dressed here in his buckskin shirt, his hat decorated with turkey feathers and a fox-tail brush, and holding his treasured pipe, Pierre is apparently deep in thought. -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.
provenance
William T. Walters, Baltimore, 1858-1860, by commission; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1894, by inheritance; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.
date
1858-1860
rightsUri
CC0
language
en
genreSpecific
Painting & Drawing
watercolors (paintings)
imageCount
1
pageCount
1
source
import
dimensions
units
cm
width
23.7
height
31.8
dimensionsRaw
9 5/16 x 12 1/2 in. (23.7 x 31.8 cm)
Source extras
med
watercolor on paper
creator_ids
4486
collection_ids
EAN
exhibition_ids
2167
2164
Single page context
seq
1
pageIndex
0
type
photo
mediaId
2531dd0676f1478b