Lake Scene

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

"From the foreground the eye of the spectator is conducted through a gentle slope with groups of mountain pines at intervals, to a peninsula jutting out into the glorious sheet of water;- thence it wanders across the Lake to a bare salmon-coloured granite rock, rising abruptly out of its depths, clothed towards the top with stunted trees and hardly evergreens,- still more distant is the eternal ice and snow barrier that shuts in the scene:- the solitary rock lying near the end of the Lake, most probably formed at one time in part of the mountains to the right;- the interval between having become dammed up, and trees growing upon it." 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.