SHELBURNE, VT.- Shelburne Museum recently acquired a work by Alfred Jacob Miller, an American artist noted for his depictions of the American West, Director Thomas Denenberg announced. Departure of the Caravan at Sunrise complements works in Shelburne’s American paintings collection including works by Edward Hicks, Charles Deas, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Carl Rungius and Ogden Pleissner.

“We are so grateful to Shelburne Museum friend Teri Perry for gifting the museum this superb painting by Alfred Jacob Miller,” Denenberg said. “Departure of the Caravan at Sunrise is a classic example of Miller’s work and provides a view into the 19th century fascination with the people and idealized rituals of the plains of North America. We are thrilled to have it join Shelburne’s American art collection.”

The public is invited to learn more about Miller and Departure of the Caravan at Sunrise at a free webinar at 6 p.m. Wed, March 17. Shelburne Museum Associate Curator Katie Wood Kirchhoff along with Miller scholar Lisa Strong, Director of the Art and Museum Studies M.A. Program and Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University closely examine the painting and discuss the artist’s larger role in the history of American art. Strong is author of Sentimental Journey: The Art of Alfred Jacob Miller (2008).

Born in Baltimore at the beginning of the 19th century, Miller’s name would eventually become synonymous with depictions of the trappers, fur traders, and Native Americans who populated America’s western frontier. In the spring of 1837, Miller met William Drummond Stewart (1795–1871), a Scottish adventurer and former British military officer fascinated by North America’s western frontier. Stewart hired Miller to accompany him to the American Fur Company’s annual gathering in the Rocky Mountains known as “the rendezvous” with the aim of recording scenes from the journey through present-day Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado and Wyoming. The sketches that Miller created during the roughly five-week journey west provided valuable fodder for the artist once he returned to his studio in New Orleans, Louisiana, fueling a series of monumentally scaled pictures for Murthly Castle, Stewart’s estate in Scotland, in addition to hundreds of additional works in watercolor and oil.

Departure of the Caravan at Sunrise was inspired by these travels with Stewart. With a bright sun rising in the east, the landscape is filled with opportunity and optimism as trappers and traders prepare to break camp. A long line of covered wagons known as “prairie schooners” extends across the canvas and draws attention to Stewart and his white horse at the center of the composition. (This horse appears numerous times in Miller’s pictures of the rendezvous, a nod toward Stewart’s important patronage.) Several groups of indigenous men, women and children appear in the picture’s foreground as they cook, load gear and prepare for the day ahead. While the term Manifest Destiny would not be coined until 1845, burgeoning ideas about the potential of North America’s western frontier certainly fueled enthusiasm for the creation of works like this one. Given events like the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the War of 1812, artists like Miller may have perceived events like the rendezvous as part of a progression of Anglo-American expansion across the North American continent.