American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Papageorge Family Collection

We wish to thank Dr. Adam Duncan Harris of the National Museum of Wildlife Art and the Carl Rungius Catalogue Raisonné Committee for confirming that the present painting will be included in the forthcoming digital database of the Artist's work. Tundra (alternatively titled After the Storm), an impressive canvas by German-born American wildlife artist Carl Rungius, depicts a pair of North American moose within a snow-covered landscape. Under an azure sky and against a backdrop of lofty mountain peaks, the moose amble sure-footedly into the composition’s middleground. Sunlight rakes across the canvas, spotlighting the pair’s shovel-shaped antlers and throwing shadows onto the powder below.Exhibited at the California Art Club in 1938, Tundra is a testament to Rungius’ career-long commitment to documenting the West and its wild inhabitants. An avid sportsman and conservationist, with a keen understanding of anatomy, Rungius excelled at situating animals within their natural surroundings, while presenting them to their best advantage. In Tundra, he arranges his specimens in both profile and three-quarter view—an invitation to admire their dappled hides and powerful, yet elegant forms. So faithful were Rungius’ renderings that they were occasionally chosen for reproduction in contemporary reference works. The present painting, illustrated as After the Storm, accompanied an entry in Mammals and Birds: A Selection of Articles from the New 14th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929-33). With bold color and confident brushwork, Rungius, at once, celebrates the majesty of his untamed subjects and the splendor of the high country.Although Rungius painted a menagerie of big game—from elk and bear to caribou and bighorn sheep—viewers reserved special praise for his depictions of moose. Fellow outdoorsman and former president, Teddy Roosevelt, upon visiting the artist’s New York studio, identified one work in progress as “the most spirited animal painting [he had] ever seen.” In fresh-to-market examples like Tundra, collectors are reminded of the unspoiled landscapes beloved by the so-called Bull Moose candidate—and of a creature that, in Rungius' own words, was “the essence of the wilderness itself.”