Content provided in partnership with

Carl Rungius in context

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Lyle C. Gray, Eleanor Jones Harvey

Carl Rungius, born Carl Clemens Moritz Rungius in Germany, has long been celebrated as one of the finest painters of wildlife in the United States - an accolade that has neither enhanced his reputation nor done justice to his oeuvre. His choice of subject matter and his preference for living and working outside the mainstream of New York City's art world have contributed to his present position on the margins of art historical acclaim. Yet during his lifetime he enjoyed a reputation similar to that of his colleagues Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington (1861-1909).

Most Popular Articles in Home & Garden: Coolest room on the block: have a bedroom that's way drab and boring? Hang ...; Reuse, recycle, remodel: environmentally friendly materials and techniques ...; Keeping it simple: interior designer Michael Lee finds an overdesigned ...; House of the Year: this craftsman-inspired home is factory-built--proving ...; Dreaming of cabin life: smart ideas for small spaces, plus the hottest spots ...; More »

The National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has the largest collection of Rungius's work in this country, second only in size to that at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Canada. Another substantial collection is in the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont.

Rungius studied animals at firsthand in the Berlin zoo and approached animal painting in the European tradition of Jean Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755) and George Stubbs (1724-1806). From John James Audubon (1785-1851) and Mark Catesby (c. 1682-1749) to Robert Bateman (b. 1930), wildlife art has been judged in the United States on its realism rather than its aesthetic merits. As such, wildlife art is frequently associated with popular illustration and natural history dioramas. Even the forays by Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921) into animal camouflage have until recently been viewed only as pseudoscientific efforts rather than as works of art.

By matching animal to habitat, Rungius continued the blending of natural history and fine art begun centuries earlier. His singular contribution to American art is his choice of the western American landscape and its wildlife as his subjects. His popularity at the turn of the century with influential hunters, politicians, and conservationists coincided with the growing interest in wildlife preservation and setting aside wilderness for national parks and private nature preserves.

Rungius immigrated to the United States in 1896, the year after he had first traveled to Wyoming. As an avid hunter he used both the rifle and paintbrush while roaming the American and Canadian Rockies during the first decade of the new century, camping in the wild for weeks and learning to track and recognize specific animals. Then, as time went on, his interest in depicting the vanishing wildlife and open land superseded his interest in trophy hunting. In 1915 he wrote:

At first I went to those countries for the sport they offered....And then gradually I found that the painting, on the hunting trips, was becoming the important thing, and what mattered to me about the animals was not shooting them but painting them.(1)

In 1910, at the invitation of Jimmy Simpson, a Canadian hunting guide, Rungius began to make regular trips to the Canadian Rockies near Banff in Alberta to sketch and hunt. He became so taken with the region that beginning in 1922 he and his wife, Louise, split the year between New York City and a studio and house in Banff that he called the Paintbox.

Many of the leading artists of the late nineteenth century painted frontier life, coastal and inland sport fishing scenes, and still lifes of dead game, yet few made these subjects central to their work. Homer and Remington shared Rungius's passion for hunting and painting wildlife. Homer's Adirondack paintings in oils and watercolors were often interpreted as meditations on life and death and only secondarily as commentaries on hunting and fishing. As such, Homer's deer hunting pictures have much in common with Rungius's approach to wildlife. A case in point is Homer's October Day (Pl. IV) of 1889 and Rungius's Alerted (Pl. V), completed in the 1920s. Homer's vibrantly painted autumnal landscape is tense with the drama of hound and hunter chasing a stag into the calm lake. The deer will be forced to swim until exhausted, when it will either be clubbed or shot to death and pulled into the boat. As early as the 1870s the Adirondacks was the center of heated debate over such unethical hunting methods. Homer's watercolor implicitly rebukes the practice of this method of hunting deer, in keeping with the artist's admiration for Theodore Roosevelt's attempts to reform hunting laws.(2)

Rungius also establishes tension between the calm of the landscape and the muscular buck that has stopped drinking and is focused on an unseen threat. Although the artist has situated the buck deep in the forest, ostensibly far from harm, he is depicted as the perfect target, in profile and at a standstill. The ambiguity of the two points of view - that of the painter and the hunter - accentuates the tension resonant in the image. Not content to paint only trophy-quality animals for hunting patrons, Rungius focused on the moment when man encounters a potentially dangerous wild animal and the animal becomes aware of being seen. If Homer's hunting scenes focus on the chase, and by extension on the ethical implications of the hunting method, Rungius's best wildlife paintings focus on the moment of visual confrontation between man and animal.

Carl Rungius in context

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Lyle C. Gray, Eleanor Jones Harvey

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Home & Garden

Most Popular Publications in Home & Garden