Alfred Jacob Miller (181O-1874) spent six months in the Rocky Mountain West in 1837, capturing a visual record of the fur trader\u27s world for his patron, the Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart. He created only about a hundred works in the West, but over the next thirty-five years he painted close to one thousand western scenes in his studio in Baltimore, benefiting not just from Stewart\u27s patronage, but from the sustained patronage of Baltimore\u27s leading merchant princes, many of whom had commercial interests in the West. As Strong argues here in this beautifully illustrated book, published to accompany an exhibition held at the Amon Carter Museum and at the Joslyn Art Museum, Miller\u27s work cannot be understood without attention to the very local context in which it was produced
