Storm: Waiting for the Caravan

Extracts from Alfred Jacob Miller’s original text, which accompanied his images of Native Americans, are included below for reference.

One of Miller's most beautifully painted and atmospheric pictures, "Storm" shows those who have gone ahead in a driving rainstorm and are waiting for the rest of the train to catch up. Miller said that after two or three days of rain he would become depressed, causing the captain to suggest that his "early training" had been "faulty." A.J. Miller, 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

Provenance (from the French provenir, 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object.

William T. Walters, Baltimore, 1858-1860, by commission; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1894, by inheritance; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.