I know what you’re thinking: “This guy must be related to the guy who made that cereal company.”

You couldn’t be any further from the truth. He has no relation to the reason you’re eating Corn Flakes this morning.

Miner Kilbourne Kellogg, landscape and portrait painter, was born August 22, 1814 in Manlius Square, New York. His parents were adherents to Robert Owen, a Welshman famous for being one of the first utopian socialists. Owen sought to form utopian communities on the frontier,  one of them, New Harmony, was where they moved to in 1826. While there at the Indiana riverside community, he studied under Charles Alexandre Lesueur, a French landscape painter and naturalist, who considered Kellogg one of the best students he ever had. When New Harmony failed (as did most of Owen’s social experiments), the Kelloggs moved first to Jeffersonville, then to Cincinnati, where they finally settled and the junior painter would continue the rest of his training as an artist.

Throughout the course of his life he acted as courier to Europe, traveling abroad while employed by the Department of States. In 1841 he met sculptor Hiram Powers in Florence, who he became close friends with. That same year, he took a tour of Egypt and Palestine for five months, becoming one of the first Americans to visit the Middle East and study its cultures in their entirety. Like Eugene Delacroix and Theodore Gericault before him, he approached his exposure to the cultures of the Arabian Peninsula with an particular attention toward accuracy and detail. Kellogg himself was especially interested in places where biblical events took place.

By the 1860s onward, he became a collector, his traveler spirit waning in prominence. During this time, he not only did lectures on the Middle East, but also wrote articles about the old European Masters. Near the end of his life, he sold his entire collection off to a certain L.E. Holder of Cleveland. He died in 1889 in Toledo, Ohio.