O A DOUBTFUL FOOTING By F. G. R. Roth The Wild Animal in Art By Bertha H. Smith NE day, about a dozen years ago, the wild animal woke up, yawned, stretched his toes, and found himself famous. Over night he had become a recognized factor in literature and in art. Before that there could not have been found in America enough paintings of wild animals to fill the prongs of an elk antler. Now and then, in exhibitions, one came upon a Landseer or Rosa Bonheur elk or a Briton Riviere lion, before which people paused a moment, read the signature, and walked on. In sculpture there was nothing wilder than a Texas pony or an Indian in warbonnet, unless we pass as sculpture sundry stone lions couchant guarding city doorways, or the stucco fawns standing stark on grassy slopes of private lawns and public parks. American artists did not paint and model wild animals, because no one seemed to want them. People bought Madonnas, good and bad, and questionable plaster Venuses, fat little Cupids dancing skirtless skirt dances in azure skies, bold bronze warriors, carrots and cabbages on deal tables, and marble busts of Cleopatra and Shakespeare, but not elephants, lions, and moose. Edward Kemeys, of Washington, with whose animal bronzes in the Corcoran Art Gallery and groups on public buildings and in Fairmount and Central Park many are familiar, was about the only artist of the old school in America who ventured to do animal work before the wild animal came into popular favor. American taste in art has been cast in the French mold, and the French are not animal lovers. Among all her artists Rosa Bonheur is the one name that stands out boldly as that of a painter of animals. Gérôme did a few notable animal pieces, but his greater fame rests on other things. Among French sculptors there is but a trio of animal men-Barye, Frémiet, and Gardet. In Germany the wild animal has always had a prominent place, but German influence on American art has never been marked, and few in America have even heard the name of Friese, perhaps the greatest of all animal painters, or of a half-score more of notable German animal men. The only wellknown English signatures are those of Landseer, Briton Riviere, John Swan, and Arthur Wardell. Not having been tutored, then, in a taste for the wild animal in art, it remained for the impulse to be projected from an unwonted source. So it chanced one day that Kipling wrote his Jungle Books and Ernest Thompson Seton came sheep, human figures-anything that any one would buy. Another was painting landscapes in his Paris studio; and the fourth, a woman, and the only woman who models animals exclusively, was practicing seven or eight hours a day on the violin and by way of recreation trying to coax some animal form out of the lumps of clay picked up in a sculptor sister's studio. But the tide came that was to lead the waiting artists on to more or less of fame and fortune. The Jungle Books furnished a direct opportunity to Will H. Drake, who thus became the pioneer among animal illustrators of the new school, unless that distinction belongs by natural right to Mr. Seton, who, however, along and introduced us to some wild animals he had known, and of a sudden people found a keen new interest in their brother beasts. While Kipling was writing his books and Mr. Seton was getting acquainted with the wild animals of America, a group of American artists who were, all unconsciously, awaiting the tide were variously engaged. One was designing stained-glass windows; one, a young German, who was to become identified with American art, was painting horses and cows between his terms of service in the German army; another was tramping Europe copying the works of old masters, while another was earning a living in a taxidermist's shop. Of the American sculptors who now devote all their time to wild animal studies, two were then modeling horses, confined his illustrations to his own books. Just at this time Charles R. Knight was recovering from an attack of nervous prostration brought on by too close application to his work in a stainedglass factory. He took out and dusted off the animal sketches that expressed his hitherto unprofitable preference, and began to illustrate animal stories in magazines, which were quick to respond to this new appreciation, and in textbooks, which are replacing with the work of artists the weird little woodcuts that were about as lifelike as the Noah's ark animals we loved and ate the paint off of in our baby days. That Mr. Knight has become the foremost of American animal painters is a fulfillment of the prophecy made at that time by one of the best of modern French artists. With a bundle of drawings under his arm, Mr. CARL RUNGIUS SKETCHING A RECENTLY KILLED MOUNTAIN SHEEP IN ALASKA Knight was introduced by an American sculptor then in Paris to Gérôme. After looking over the drawings Gérôme said, "Without flattering you in the least, these are the most remarkable, the most perfect drawings of animal life I have ever seen. Have you shown them to my friend Frémiet ?" On being told that he had not, Gérôme said: "Go at once to Frémiet and tell him it is on my part that you come." Frémiet was even more enthusiastic. He looked at one or two of the drawings, and, in surprise at their correctness, asked, You do these from photographs?" And when Mr. Knight assured him that they were done after nature, he said, "Do you swear that?" Then, rich as the French language is in adjectives, it was inadequate to express his opinion of the young artist's work. "You are an honor to your country," he said. "But will you have time and money to give your own time to study without having to do magazine work?" When Mr. Knight told him that he hoped to be able to do both, Frémiet replied, regretfully, You have for years been .. studying to do things to please us, the artists. Now it seems you will have to do something to please the public-and the public are fools." In spite of Frémiet's fear, however, Mr. Knight has not worked down to a public that does not know, but, instead, has helped to give the public an appreciation of what he knows. This is possible where magazines are willing to pay for the right to reproduce the best work of the best artists as art works pure and simple, and not for illustrative purposes. Mr. Knight has painted almost every animal but a horse, which is the one he seems not to understand. To him a horse, with its smooth hair, docked tail, and cropped mane, always immaculate, has no more character than a piano. Nor does he like to paint well-bred dogs, though one of his recent pictures is of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan's prize collie. He holds that all animals lose in character as they gain in breeding, and he would rather paint a bronco than a race-horse, or a wolf rather than the prize-winner of a bench show. His favorite subjects are the large felines, which are not po CHARLES R. KNIGHT PAINTING A PORTRAIT OF SULTAN IN THE BRONX ZOO" seurs as are elk and deer, but just the great stupid, styleless, unspirited beasts Nature made them. About the time when Mr. Knight was showing his drawings to Gérôme in Paris a young German came to America for a hunting trip in the Maine woods. His name was Carl Rungius, and he had been commissioned to accompany the German Emperor on his annual hunt that year to make paintings of the game captured by the Imperial party. But this trip into the Maine woods changed the artist's plans, and he determined to settle down in America and paint American big game animals-moose, caribou, and wapiti. In his first years of study he had attended a school of applied arts, and while he was supposed to be in a class for decorative fresco work he was away at the zoological gardens sketching lions, or out in some pasture drawing horses and cows. Later he studied in the Berlin Academy, where within a halfyear he won the prize for a lion's head in the exhibition. In that time he seemed to have got all that his teacher could give him, and he found that to make the most of his art he must work it out alone. He studied by himself until he was called to do service in the German army. This took him away from his work for a year, and for two months of two succeeding years. But in the time that was his own he continued painting cat animals, horses, and cows, always with a preference for hoof animals. But Mr. Rungius, who is a sportsman as well as an artist, has cast his lot with the big game animals of this country, and become the foremost painter of them in America. From three to five months of every year he spends in the woods, now in Maine, now in Wyoming, and again in Alaska. Returning from one of these trips, his mind is always vividly alive to conception, and more pictures form themselves there than he can get time to put on canvas, though he is an indefatigable worker, often sketching far into the night. His canvases are remarkable for the absolute correctness of detail in the landscape. In this he shows himself every inch a German. Those who follow the French school have the French dis |