Art: Artist on the Western frontier

Alfred Jacob Miller was one of a half-dozen American artists, some foreign-born, who introduced the Western frontier, particularly indigenous cultures, to American art.

This happened mainly in the 1830s, when Miller and his contemporaries ventured beyond the Mississippi River into the Great Plains, as far as the Rocky Mountains.

The first to go, perhaps the most prolific and best-known Indian painter, was George Catlin, a native of Wilkes-Barre, who traveled up the Missouri River for 2,000 miles with an American Fur Co. expedition in 1832.

Miller, a Baltimore native, made his extended trip in 1837 as expedition artist and companion to a Scottish aristocrat and adventurer, Capt. William Drummond Stewart.

Like Catlin, who was a lawyer before teaching himself to paint, Miller was ignorant of the West and American Indian culture when he left his New Orleans studio.

Unlike Catlin, he was professionally trained. He studied first with Thomas Sully in Baltimore, then in 1833-34 traveled to Paris and several other European cities, where he copied Old Masters to polish his technique.

First in Baltimore, then in New Orleans, he specialized in conventional portraiture. The western trip required him to develop new skills, particularly the sketching of daily human activities that culminated in the drama and violence of hunting - buffalo by the Indians and bears and other big game by Stewart.

Working primarily in pencil, ink, and watercolor, Miller recorded dozens of scenes, landscapes, and incidents during his half-year of observing native life. This inventory of sketches provided raw material for small, album-scale watercolors and larger paintings for the rest of his career (he died in 1874 at 64).

Stewart alone commissioned a number of works for his castle in Scotland; Miller painted there for a year in 1840. Even though he went on making portraits in Baltimore after the trip, his watercolors and oils of the West, which he continued to produce throughout his life, established his reputation.

That's a long way around the barn to reach the news, which is that a traveling exhibition of 30 of Miller's Western pictures has gone on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This might not sound like a banner headline, but numbers alone don't always convey the depth of an exhibition's appeal or significance.

For instance, Kathleen A. Foster, the museum's curator of American art, reports that this group of pictures was originally assembled into an album by Miller. The album descended in his family for several generations until it was acquired by Bank of America.

The significance of this? It's that the artist himself created this particular mix of pictures to demonstrate the range of his subjects to potential clients who might commission copies.

One might presume, then, that the show represents a cross-section of the more than 100 scenes that Miller recorded for Stewart, some of which show him hunting.

For today's audience, a deeper level of information and insight emerges when one looks carefully. Miller's contemporaries would have found the subjects novel and fascinating, presumably because they would have considered the scenes "realistic."

We can see, though, how Miller manipulated and mediated reality for dramatic effect by infusing what he experienced with the overarching spirit of the period, romanticism.

The exhibition title, "Romancing the West," projects this. For instance, hunting scenes excepted, Miller doesn't usually portray conflict directly. Even in Indian Women Watching a Battle, the spectators, prominent in the foreground, are the subject; the battle is relegated to the distance.

And in two watercolors titled War Path and On the Warpath - Running Fight, Miller isolates the warriors in question, who cling to the sides of their mounts, from any real or implied combat.

Similarly, Stampede of Wild Horses is essentially a majestic landscape; the stampede is a secondary feature. Migration of the Pawnees is loosely descriptive, without narrative tension.

One notices, too, that Miller's skies are lusciously pastel-hued and soothing, an echo of the mid-19th-century landscape movement called luminism. His Indians are noble primitives, their lives well-ordered, reflecting an arcadian spirit.

It's as if Miller transposed Breton peasants or New England rustics into the Western wilderness. One of the more obvious examples is a watercolor of an Indian woman sleeping: She reclines in her bower like the legendary Ariadne of Naxos.

A panoramic narrative such as Buffalo Hunt, Black Hills suggests a composite, created by assembling individual vignettes. The balance of elements is a bit too precise to be natural, even if the limited palette suggests something sketched on the spot.

Likewise the image of two mounted Indians with lances killing a buffalo wedged between them is too pat to have "just happened." If there's an iconic Miller image, this is it, but could he actually have sketched such a violent confrontation so precisely from so close up?

Finally, there's the issue of the mixed media, and the variety of papers used. Many watercolors are embellished with oils, gouache, various colored inks, and glazes.

This suggests that these works, even if they began as on-the-spot sketches, are studio productions, removed in time from the experience. Miller didn't date his pictures, so it's hard to be certain.

Such clues lead to the inevitable conclusion that Miller mixed reality liberally with imagination, memory, and cinematic editing. Perhaps unconsciously, he recorded the West that he wanted his audience and clients to see.

Is this so bad? I don't think so. The values Miller imposed on the wild, wild West not only reflect his time, they also help explain the colonizing attitude that was instrumental in displacing the culture that Miller immortalized.

And there are many naive touches that make the pictures appealing, such as the hunted bear that looks more like a wolverine or a giant groundhog, and the "hobbyhorse" posture of galloping horses and an antelope, which wasn't disproved by Eadweard Muybridge's photographs until years after Miller's trip.

The romantic aura of Miller's gaze can't completely mask periodic glimpses of unvarnished reality - the Indian dwelling that, as drawn, appears to be made of branches, and the casual portrait of a "free trapper," Old Bill Burrows, standing by his mule, as authentic to the Old West as Chimney Rock or the Oregon Trail.

"Romancing the West" continues in the American wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, through Sept. 18. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and to 8:45 p.m. Fridays. Admission is $16 general, $14 for visitors 65 and older, and $12 for students with ID and visitors 13 to 18. Pay what you wish first Sunday of the month. Information: 215-763-8100, or www.philamuseum.org.

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