On the Range

The 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.