Returning Home

Alfred Jacob Miller’s monumental oil painting returns to the Joslyn Art Museum after extended tour.

Now on view at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, is Alfred Jacob Miller’s mid-1800s work The Surround. The painting, at nearly 8 feet wide, was a key part of the traveling exhibition Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art, which opened in 2016 and visited museums in Tennessee, Vermont and Texas.

The exhibition included major works from many important Western artists, including William Tylee Ranney, John George Brown, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Charles M. Russell, William R. Leigh, Charles Deas and Frederic Remington. But it was Miller’s enormous painting of Native American hunters on horseback surrounding buffalo that most enthralled visitors to the acclaimed exhibition.

The work, with its dramatic action scene and moody tones, was inspired by a scene Miller saw while traveling in 1837 with William Drummond

Stewart, who asked Miller to accompany him on a trip to the Rocky Mountains so he could record their adventures at the annual fur trading fair known as the rendezvous.

“Buffalo hunts were high points of the journey for both men,” according to the museum’s historical record of the piece and its origins. “Miller described a ‘surround’ (a Plains Indian method of hunting): ‘On reaching a proper distance, a signal is given and they all start at once with frightful yells, and commence racing around the herd, drawing their circle closer and closer, until the whole body is huddled together in confusion. Now they begin firing, and as this throws them into a headlong panic and furious rage, each man selects his animal.’”

Miller made his pictures in the field with pencil, ink and watercolors. Later, in his Baltimore studio, he translated these early pictures into oil paintings for Stewart and, later, for other patrons fascinated by the West. The Surround was executed specifically for Murthly Castle, Stewart’s ancestral home in Scotland.

For more information about the painting or the museum, visit www.joslyn.org.

Alfred Jacob Miller (18101874), The Surround, ca. 1839, oil on canvas, 66 x 94½". Collection of Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE, Museum purchase, 1963.611.