Flight and Predation

Abstract

A delightful irony informs the western art of Alfred Jacob Miller—the numerous dramatic hunting scenes in particular—works that rely for their authority on an ostensibly archival record of the world yet indulge the viewer in imaginative vicarious release. Miller himself attributed the appeal of these images to the way their calculatedly naturalized indeterminacy—an effect he referred to as “mistiness”—left “full play” to the beholder’s imagination. In style, but also in structure and theme, the nearly one hundred sketches and drawings he produced at the fur trade rendezvous in the Green River Valley during the summer of 1837, along with hundreds of copies and variants over the next three decades, elaborated a pictorial poetics that far exceeded, indeed subverted, the strictures of conventional documentary. Their characteristic rhythm of tension and release served to thematize desire and transcendence, death and apotheosis—a dialectic of bodily facticity and mistily disembodied oneiric flight. Underlying and motivating any more specific associations, whether sentimental, commercial, or historical, Miller’s images encouraged reverie, a phenomenological response largely indifferent and in some respects resistant to the influence of history or reason. In keeping with the prevailing romanticism of the age, the irony informing this anti-documentary aesthetic further dramatized his pictorial case for the power of human imagination.