The Good Samaritan

Miller actively pursued his painterly career after returning from his time at Murthly Castle, accepting a number of commissions which sometimes reached twenty portraits a year during the 1840s and early 1850s. In 1844, he began exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1847, and the American Art-Union in 1851, receiving $230, a modest but not insignificant sum, from the Art-Union that year for three pictures that he exhibited there. This painting of The Good Samaritan was also done that year, based on the incident of the starving trappers included in Ruxton’s Life in the Far West. Ruxton described the trappers as asleep on the ground and in a starving condition as the initial riders approached, but Miller’s painting suggests that the man on the right is too weak to get up. He has reversed the positions of the rifle and the campfire (as compared to the sketch, CR# 163) and included a portion of Independence Rock immediately behind the figures. (Clark, 1982, p. 67; Ross, 1968, text accompanying plate 163; Ruxton, 1951, pp. 130 – 138)

Ron Tyler