Carl Rungius in context

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

Both artists became involved in wildlife conservation. Homer was a member of the North Woods Club, a hunting and fishing preserve in the Adirondacks, but he maintained his distance from the political issues surrounding conservation. Rungius, however, became more directly involved with the policies espoused by Theodore Roosevelt, in particular the issue of wildlife conservation within the larger framework of preserving the wilderness.(3) Roosevelt instigated the formation of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, which was one of the most influential organizations for effecting changes in big game hunting.(4) He had recently spent two years ranching on the Little Missouri River in the Dakota Territory, experiencing firsthand the decimation of game animals by market hunters and settlers alike. On his return to New York City Roosevelt enlisted some of the leading members of society to help found the club. These included Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the newspaperman and former Secretary of the Interior Charles Schurz, the historian Francis Parkman, and the artist Albert Bierstadt. William Temple Hornaday (1854-1937), the first director of the New York Zoological Society, was an outspoken advocate of the club, and when, in February 1895, he saw one of Rungius's early paintings of a moose in the window of M. Knoedler and Company in New York City, he realized the potential for these paintings to further the goals of the Boone and Crockett Club.(5)

Hornaday's friendship and patronage proved to be a catalyst for Rungius's career. He bought his paintings, introduced him to his well-connected friends, and procured membership for him in the Camp Fire Club of America.(6) It had been organized in 1896 by George Oliver Shields (1846-1925), a prominent game conservationist and the founder, publisher, and editor of Recreation, a leading sportsman's magazine. The aim of the club was to set and enforce bag limits on fish and game, especially on species endangered by predators. In 1903 the club became a national organization, promoting conservation and the enjoyment of nature. Membership requirements included camping in the wilderness for at least three weeks and the killing of at least three species of big game. Rungius easily met these requirements as a result of his extensive hunting and camping trips in Wyoming. In 1927 he also became a member of the Boone and Crockett Club.

Social contacts Rungius secured through Hornaday and the Camp Fire Club provided him with his initial success in illustration work beginning in 1895. Like Homer and Remington, Rungius at first depended on magazine illustration work for economic subsistence. Between 1895 and 1905 he worked primarily for outdoor and sporting periodicals that advocated conservation and needed high quality pictures of wildlife to support their position. Rungius published work in Forest and Stream, Everybody's Magazine, Outing (for which Remington also provided illustrations), and later Recreation, with which he was strongly identified.