Carl Rungius in context

Rungius's pure landscapes recall those that John Singer Sargent painted during the summers he, his family, and his friends, spent in the Alps after 1900. Although best known for his society portraits, Sargent exhibited many of these landscapes at the Royal Academy of Art and the New English Art Club, both in London - evidence of the importance he attached to them.(12) Sargent visited the Canadian Rockies in July 1916, where he spent the month sketching and painting the scenery that Rungius soon made a staple of his own work. Sargent painted several watercolors, some depicting camp life, as well as large oils of Yoho Falls and Lake O'Hara (Pl. VIII). Rungius painted a strikingly similar view of Lake O'Hara (Pl. VI). His bold, dean brushwork delineates the rugged contours of the mountains, water, and tangle of fallen trees, half-submerged along the shore. Both artists emphasize the sheer rock faces, compressing the edges of their compositions to stress the verticality of the terrain.

Remington's response to Rungius's work reveals the mood of the marketplace after the turn of the century and Remington's own battles with modernist critics. In both paintings and sculpture the two artists closely mirror each other's appreciation for the American West. Remington epitomized the popular western genre by pitting quintessential western types against each other and against the forces of nature.(13) His works played an important role in the creation and popularity of the mythic American West, artfully blending history and fiction. Remington attended the first major one-man exhibition of Rungius's work in 1908, at the Salmagundi Club in New York City, and afterwards sent him a letter extolling their mutual involvement in depicting rapidly disappearing aspects of American life:

For a long time I have said "This man Rungius knows our big, game animals and he knows their backgrounds, and he paints it so it looks all right to me; and I am going to own one sooner or later."...There is not likely to be another fellow who will have the opportunity to study big game as you are doing; and I think records of us fellows who are doing "Old America" which is so fast passing will have an audience in posterity, whether we do so at present or not.(14)

Remington alludes here to the critical indifference he and Rungius endured in an era more enamored of Homer and Sargent.

Following his success at the Salmagundi Club, Rungius stepped up his effort to secure a niche in the mainstream of East Coast art circles, and from about 1913 through the 1920s he shifted his attention to more widely popular subjects, including landscapes and western scenes. By this time his style had evolved from photographic precision and a pale impressionist palette to more expressionistic brushwork and bolder colors (see Pls. VII and XII). These more abstracted visions of landscape and wildlife secured Rungius's reputation and generated high praise from critics.(15)

Rungius was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1913 and a full member in 1920. In 1917 he was made a life member of the National Arts Club, and in 1919 he exhibited at the Tenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings of the Fort Worth Art Association. In 1922 his Canadian Rockies (present whereabouts unknown) won the Salmagundi Club's Vezin Prize for best picture in the exhibition. In March 1925 he was awarded the Ellen P. Speyer Memorial Prize at the National Academy's one hundredth annual exhibition for Across the Barren (Glenbow Museum), a painting of a bull and three caribou in New Brunswick, Canada. In the fall of 1925 his painting Lake McArthur (Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Canada) won the prestigious five hundred dollar Carnegie Prize. The following year visitors to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., named his Mountaineer (present whereabouts unknown) as the winner of the Popular Prize. In 1927 the National Academy elected Rungius to a three-year term on its council, and in 1929 he was awarded the Saltus Medal of Merit for a painting of a moose entitled Wilderness (present whereabouts unknown).