2026 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction / Lot 137135 / 379 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Label, Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Wickenburg, Arizona
Surveying the artist’s career, Dr. Rick Stewart wrote, “Carl Rungius was the greatest wildlife painter of the western wilderness. There was no other artist who studied the animals and the landscape so closely, or who painted them with a greater degree of skill and understanding. His father and grandfather were amateur naturalists in their native Germany, and Rungius studied wildlife painting at the Berlin Academy. In 1894, he received an invitation from relatives to come to America for a moose-hunting expedition in Maine. He stayed afterwards, settling in New York, and developed a career for the next ten years as a wildlife illustrator for a variety of outdoor magazines. In 1895, he journeyed to the Rocky Mountains to a ranch at the foot of the Wind River chain in Wyoming. He hunted and sketched profusely for five months, traveling as far as Jackson Hole and the Yellowstone country. Returning to New York, he adorned his studio with his trophies and determined to stay in America. Rungius returned to Wyoming in successive years, and in 1904, accompanied a scientific expedition into Canada’s Yukon Territory where he studied high mountain sheep. Back in New York, he became a popular and well-respected artist, and regularly exhibited his work to high acclaim. ‘There is not likely to be another fellow who will have the opportunity to study big game as you are doing,’ Frederic Remington wrote him admiringly ‘and I think records of us fellows who are doing the ‘Old America’ which is so fast passing will have an audience in posterity.’”
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Montana
EXHIBITED
Arizona Collects, Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Wickenburg, Arizona, 2004
