Dallas Arts

Visitors to the Amon Carter Museum can embark on a captivating visual adventure this fall in a special exhibition of paintings and drawings by Alfred Jacob Miller (1810–1874), the first American artist to journey into the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Sentimental Journey: The Art of Alfred Jacob Miller, on view September 20, 2008–January 11, 2009, features more than 85 works that offer firsthand depictions of the Lakota, Shoshone, Nez Perces, and other American Indian societies, as well as the last of the fur trappers and traders of the nineteenth-century American West.

Admission to all special exhibitions at the Amon Carter Museum is free.

“Miller took the people and scenery he encountered on his 1837 trip to the Rocky Mountains and created paintings with many layers of meaning out of seemingly simple western genre scenes, giving them intangible qualities such as mood and emotion,” said Lisa Strong, guest curator of the exhibition and author of the exhibition’s companion publication. “In doing this, he produced images that were more innovative and compelling than those of many of his peers working in the West or the East.”

“The title of this exhibition, though it may remind people of the popular song, was carefully chosen,” added Rick Stewart, the museum’s senior curator of western painting and sculpture. “During Miller’s lifetime, sentimentalism was an important means of identifying, inspiring, or guiding moral action. Sentiments are feelings guided by thoughts. This exhibition will demonstrate how Miller was not only interested in depicting western subjects, but also portraying them through the filter of his own nineteenth-century sensibilities as an artist.”

As Miller’s paintings communicate different stories, ideas and feelings, Sentimental Journey will offer visitors a multilayered experience: a compelling opportunity to follow Miller’s escapades in the American West with his patron, Scottish aristocrat and adventurer Sir William Drummond Stewart; a view into the ironic parallels between America’s emerging national identity during the 19th century and that of the Scottish highlander identity; an insight into the life and career of an artist of the American West whose name is less well-known and whose career is less understood than some of his contemporaries; and the story of a great visual artist as a commercially successful businessman, who painted a limited repertoire of western subjects again and again in a changing artistic style that remained relevant and appealing to successive audiences during his lifetime.

Visit the Amon Carter Museum for more.