TitleOn the Range
Artist
Carl Clemens Mortiz Rungius
(German/American, 1869 - 1959)
Date1920
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 30 1/4 × 36 1/4 in.
Framed: 41 5/8 × 47 3/4 × 3 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right: "C. Rungius"; and on the reverse: "On the Range - C. Rungius / 1920".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, May 16, 1920
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1110-P
Label TextThe artist believed the Academy would not have considered him for membership on the strength of his paintings of wild animals: "At one time I gave up painting animals and took to landscape painting instead, and it was on the latter I was made A.N.A. [Associate National Academician] and N.A. [National Academician] I had only painted three landscapes when I was made A.N.A." His choice of a representative example of his work to present to the Academy, a painting which is somewhat untypical for the artist, concentrates on landscape and a domestic animal familiar as an artistic subject, bears out his "reading" of Academy psychology. Rungius only occasionally represented the native human denizen of the west, the working rancher; his interests were those of a naturalist-artist, rather than those of artists such as Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, for whom the color and drama of cowboy genre was a central interest.
