Carl Rungius, Wildlife Painter and Modern Art Master
By Chadd Scott on
I came to the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, WY looking for Carl Rungius. I came away believing he’s not merely the finest painter of North American wildlife ever, hardly a “hot take,” but more than that, a master of Modern art, unsurpassed in his genre and in a league with America’s great representational painters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, the Ashcan School, the Taos Society of Art artists, Georgia O’Keeffe.
The German born Rungius (1869–1959) was first and foremost a wildlife artist, true. But the landscapes contained within his animal paintings are as good as have ever been produced in America. Masterpieces in their own right. He was also, importantly, a first-rate Modern artist irrespective of genre.
His paintings aren’t merely deft reproductions of bears and moose and wolves, they have life, and energy, and personality. His paintings express as much “feel” as fidelity. He applied the lessons of Impressionism, and post-Impressionism. Look at how he built the rocks in his artworks, clearly influenced by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). His backgrounds are routinely abstracted.
The National Museum of Wildlife Art hits visitors with what I believe to be Rungius’ most spectacular painting straight away, in the lobby. A warm autumn sun shines off the fur in American Black Bear (1929). The bear’s coat is slick, fat, ready to hibernate. Rungius casts sunshine so masterfully on the animal’s side, just by looking at it, sensations of warm, coarse, bear fur can be felt – actually felt – in the hands of onlookers. A spectacular landscape of brilliantly turning fall colors – abstracted – backdrops the animal.
This is what I like to call “a Met painting,” meaning, it could hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, arguably the best art museum in the world.
The NMWA has a number of “Met paintings” by Rungius on view: The Stampede (1898), Northern King (1926), Wyoming Sage (1902). In the later, Rungius demonstrates his versatility, portraying a sun-bleached summer scene of white and tan pronghorn as adeptly as a nearly black moose in a darkened forest.
A recent acquisition, The Family (On the Homeward Trail) (1930), equals this caliber. Donated by NMWA Trustee Emerita Lynn Friess and the Friess Family Foundation, The Family pictures a mother grizzly and two cubs moving through a mountain landscape.
Carl Rungius, 'The Family (On the Homeward Trail),' (1930). Oil on canvas. Gift of the Friess Family Foundation. National Museum of Wildlife Art.
“Rungius paintings of family scenes are very rare, and this is one of his best,” Adam Duncan Harris, the Grainger/Kerr Director of the multi-year Carl Rungius Catalogue Raisonné project, said in an announcement for the acquisition. “There are seven mother and cub scenes in Rungius’s entire body of work. In his depictions of other species, I couldn’t find anything similar—no moose mothers and calves, for example.”
The NMWA holds the most extensive collection of work by Rungius in the United States. Seeing one masterpiece after another in this volume reinforces his preeminence in the wildlife genre. The artist spent summers painting and sketching in the high country – the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming and Alberta, Canada – with winters in New York, creating his finished canvases.
The Museum’s Rungius Gallery also features dozens of lively 10” x 12” landscape sketches alongside his large scale, fully fledged, oil on canvas paintings. These pictures were almost certainly produced on site, in the field, each brilliantly fresh, quick, loose, colorful, breezy, and invigorating. They take you to the mountains. Feel the wind in your hair, the sun on your back. Smell the fresh air, the pine. Hear the leaves rustling, a bugling elk.
Amazing.
Rungius first visited the U.S. in 1894, accepting an uncle’s invitation to a moose hunt in Maine. The unsuccessful foray encouraged the artist to hang around. The following summer, he went out West, to Wyoming.
It was love at first sight. The space. The landscape, The mountains. The animals – the elk and pronghorn and bear.
"My decision to cut all ties with the Old World and to live in America for good was due in no small part to this first Wyoming trip,” Rungius said. “For my heart was in the West."
He went to the Yukon Territory in 1904. He became involved in the nation’s nascent conservation movement. The beaver and buffalo had been trapped and hunted nearly to extinction in the West by the time Rungius arrived. Bears and wolves and cougars were next on the American settler colonial’s “to kill” list. During his extensive time “out West” in the early 20th century, he would have seen the numbers of these animals collapse dramatically. Elk too.
Carl Rungius, 'American Black Bear' (1929). Oil on canvas. Gift of the Jackson Hole Preserve, National Museum of Wildlife Art.
In 1910, he made his first visit to the Canadian Rockies. Utterly captivated, he built a summer studio there, in Banff, in 1921, working from April to October there each year until his death in 1959. He died at his easel.
What Rungius did – paint animals – no one has ever done better, before or since. Gratefully, in contrast to much Western wildlife art produced in the era, Rungius’ paintings esteem the animals, glorify the animals, encourage and enhance love for the animals. His grizzly bears aren’t being tortured and abused by mountain men, snarling and flailing as they’re being lassoed in advance of murder. His wolves aren’t a menace to ranchers, they’re the original and rightful residents of the landscape. His elk are more than food.
Traditional Western art – the stereotypical cowboys and Indians stuff – for non-Native artists, descends from Russell and Remington. Modern Western art and landscapes, from Dixon and O’Keeffe. Wildlife art, just as surely, from Rungius.
For the tens of thousands of moose and elk and bear and wolf paintings filling galleries from Taos to Whitefish, Rungius is the wellspring.
