Sale 215 Lot 291

ALFRED JACOB MILLER
American, 1810-1874
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S NEPHEW AND NIECE, THE WICKHAM CHILDREN, CIRCA 1865
Oil on canvas
Portrait depicting two young children, an older boy in a dark green jacket and a younger girl in a white dress with a red sash, seated outdoors with a small terrier dog at their feet, set against a sunset landscape. Signed lower left. Framed.

NOTE: RESTORED BY ART PAGE RESTORATION

$2,500-3,500

ARTIST PROFILE: Alfred Jacob Miller was a pioneering American painter born in Baltimore, Maryland, whose place in art history is secured by his unique distinction as the only trained artist to have traveled the American West along the Oregon Trail during the era of the mountain men, producing an invaluable visual record of a vanishing frontier world. After studying in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and in Rome, Miller returned to Baltimore before accepting a transformative commission in 1837 from the Scottish adventurer Captain William Drummond Stewart to accompany him on a fur-trading expedition to the Rocky Mountains. The sketches and paintings Miller produced on that journey — vivid, romantic depictions of Native American encampments, buffalo hunts, trappers, and the dramatic landscapes of Wyoming and the Green River Valley — constitute an irreplaceable ethnographic and artistic document of the pre-settlement West, executed with a fluid, painterly touch informed by his European academic training and his admiration for Delacroix. Returning east, Miller spent time in New Orleans and Baltimore, and devoted much of the remainder of his career to producing finished oils and watercolors based on his Western sketches for patrons and collectors, his work bridging the Romantic tradition and the documentary impulse of American frontier art. His paintings are held in major public collections including the Walters Art Museum, the Joslyn Art Museum, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.