The West of Alfred Jacob Miller (1837): from the Notes and Water Colors in The Walters Collection with an Account of the Artist

University of Oklahoma Press [Published date: 1951]. Hard cover. Stated First Edition. Contents include 27 (xxviii) pages - Introduction by Marvin C. Ross, followed by 200 single page black and white plates with the description on the page opposite of the plate, and and an Account of Indian Pictures, Bibliography, and index at the back. Color frontispiece. [From front jacket flap] The American West during the heyday of the mountain man and the plains Indian, roughly the first third of the nineteenth century, has had many chroniclers but few portraitists. There were no candid cameramen in that era, but as this volume now reveals, there was an incomparable artist in water colors whose work may be considered the finest record extant of the West in which he traveled. Reproduced here is the entire Walters Art Gallery collection of the water colors of Alfred Jacob Miller, together with the notes he made to accompany them?in every case authentic word and brush pictures from the artist's own experience.Alfred Jacob Miller, who was born in Baltimore in 1810, was the artist selected by Sir William Drummond Stewart to accompany his historic expedition to the Far West in 1837, to "sketch the remarkable scenery & incidents of the journey." That Stewart chose wisely is attested by the superb collection published here. Miller's importance as a painter of Indians and recorder of sights and scenes in the West is outstanding, and historians will find his pictures a veritable storehouse revealing life in a great epoch. If other artists reached a place before him, no appreciable amount of their work has survived, and as a water colorist, Miller is by far the best of those who painted the Far West in the early days. The water colors here shown-together with the frontispiece, which is reproduced in the fresh colors of the original-are complete studio versions painted for William T. Walters from the rough sketches made on the spot.