Carl Rungius 1869 - 1959
In 1894, Carl Rungius left his home in Berlin and came to the United States for the express purpose of roaming, hunting and painting America’s big game animals. For the next fifty years, Rungius developed an expressive, dramatic approach to depicting America’s high country game animals on canvas, an approach rooted in naturalism but not at all photographic. Rungius’s skills grew as he worked with naturalists like Caspar Whitney and William Hornaday, the director of the New York Zoological Society (now the Bronx Zoo) but his long trips to the Rockies, Alberta and the Yukon in the first decade of the 20th century gave rise to his signature style. marrying the geometry of place to an unerring sense of the line of animal anatomy—a scrupulous consideration for the artist. Rungius remains the benchmark for all other American animal painters.
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