The Philadelphia Museum of Art Shows ~ Alfred Jacob Miller ~ "Romancing the West"

Written by Conrad Kandinsky Wednesday, 25 May 2011 22:25

Philadelphia, PA - "Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection" will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from June 4th through September 18th. Baltimore native Alfred Jacob Miller (1810–1874), one of the first American artists to paint the Far West, is best remembered for his vivid chronicles of the Western fur trade and his romanticized depictions of mountain men, American Indian subjects, exotic wildlife, and the region’s stunning topography.

"Romancing the West" closely studies an intriguing selection of thirty rarely seen watercolors, surveying Miller’s most revered body of work: images of the West based on his 1837 trip accompanying the Scottish adventurer Captain William Drummond Stewart. Bound for the annual rendezvous of trappers, traders, and Native Americans at the base of Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, Stewart’s troupe traveled west from Saint Louis, following a route later known as the Oregon Trail.

For nearly three decades following this groundbreaking journey, Miller received commissions for watercolors and oil paintings inspired by his remarkable travels. His poetic figure studies, picturesque landscapes, and engaging scenes of daily life along the trail expressed his own romantic attitudes and helped shape public perceptions of the West. For many mid-nineteenth-century Americans living along the Eastern seaboard, as well as for European patrons like Stewart, Miller’s paintings offered a glimpse of a thrillingly unknown, frequently mythologized region of the country. The works presented in Romancing the West, lent courtesy of the Bank of America Collection, mix fact with fantasy, reflecting frontier life both as it was and as it was imagined to be.


Rising majestically at the end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Philadelphia Museum of Art stands as one of the great art institutions of the world. In the over 125 years since its founding, it has grown far beyond the limits originally set for it. Today, the Museum houses over 225,000 works of art encompassing some of the greatest achievements of human creativity, and offers a wealth of exhibitions and educational programs for a public of all ages. Historically, the Museum was a legacy of the great Centennial Exposition of 1876 held in Fairmount Park. The Museum's 225,000 objects span the creative achievements of the Western world since the first century AD and those of Asia since the third millennium BC. The European collections, dating from the medieval era to the present, encompass Italian and Flemish early-Renaissance masterworks including strong representations of later European paintings, featuring French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, sculpture (with a special concentration in the works of Auguste Rodin), decorative arts, tapestries, furniture and the second-largest collection of arms and armor in the United States. The museum's American collections, surveying three centuries of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, are among the finest in the United States, with outstanding strengths in 18th- and 19th-century Philadelphia furniture and silver, rural Pennsylvania furniture and ceramics, and the paintings of Thomas Eakins. Modern artwork includes extraordinary concentrations of work by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Constantin Brâncusi, as well as American modernists, making the museum one of the best in the world in which to see modern art. The expanding collection of contemporary art includes major works by Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Sol LeWitt, among many others. In addition to these collections, the museum houses encyclopedic holdings of costume and textiles, as well as prints, drawings, and photographs that are displayed in rotation for reasons of preservation. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.philamuseum.org

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