Growing up on the marshes of northwest Iowa, Maynard Reece began drawing and painting with pencils and barn paints. His seventh grade teacher introduced him to watercolors, and he decided to become an artist. Having no money for college or artistic training, Reece moved to Des Moines after high school and worked for the Iowa Museum of Natural History. While at the museum, he met J. N. "Ding" Darling, an avid conservationist, who helped him with the accuracy of his wildlife paintings. Reece joined the army in 1943, and while training in New York, he met Francis Lee Jaques and James Perry Wilson. Both of these artists had an influence on Reece's artistic work. After serving a tour in Europe, he returned to the United States to work as a freelance artist.

In 1947, Reece was invited to participate in the National Wildlife Federation's Duck Stamp competition. He won the contest in 1948 and went on to win four more in 1951, 1959, 1969, and 1971. In 1951, he provided the color images for Iowa Fish and Fishing, which led to commissions from Life magazine to paint North American game fish and saltwater fish for special color articles. Throughout his career, his work has been printed in The Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Audubon, National Wildlife and many sporting magazines. Reece wrote and illustrated two of his own books, The Waterfowl of Maynard Reece (1985) and The Upland Bird Art of Maynard Reece (1997).

As the only artist to win the Federal Duck Stamp five times, Reece is known for his accurate and simple compositions. He has traveled to the Arctic, Antarctic, Europe, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and Africa, researching and observing wildlife. He takes photographs on his travels to use as reference material when he returns to the studio, but he never copies the images. As an artist, Reece is especially concerned with the effect of lighting. He owns an extensive natural history library that he references in order to achieve accuracy in his paintings.

"The more intimate you become with animals, the better you can paint them. I have feelings for the freedom-awe and respect and compassion for nature. I spend most of my time outdoors. Everything I paint comes from there, so why shouldn't I spend my time there?"

Sources

Madson, Chris. "A Brush with the Wild: The Art of Maynard Reece," Wildlife Art(September/October 1997): 22-25.

Van Gelder, Patricia. Wildlife Artists at Work. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1982,144-161.

Frederic Remington grew up surrounded by horses and, at the age of three, he began drawing them. Drawing came naturally for Remington and his style and compositions were unique. In 1878, he attended Yale School of Fine Arts, but only remained two years, claiming he disliked the classical European art training that Yale upheld. In 1882, he traveled on the first of 21 excursions to the West in order to gather subject material. During these journeys, Remington searched for the action and drama of the "old West." Having served in the military, he favored the Anglo progression through the native lands and praised war and combat.

Remington sold his first works to Harper's Weekly and, encouraged by the sales, he pursued other magazines to fund his Western travels. He quickly gained recognition for his illustrations in Collier's, Cosmopolitan, and Outing. In 1886 Remington briefly studied at the Art Students League, but quit at the end of the term to accept a Harper's commission to illustrate Geronimo's battles against the U.S. Army in New Mexico. Remington was a prolific artist, creating 2,750 paintings and drawings, 25 bronzes, as well as illustrations for eight books and numerous magazines.

Remington's early illustrations were tightly drawn, detailed, and sharp edged, narrating a story through the delineation of action. His dramatic images of raw energy were violent and masculine. In mid-career, Remington was influenced by the French Impressionists' theory of paint application and by the Symbolist's engagement with spiritual ideas. He began to experiment with a series of nocturnes, or night paintings. Remington is best known for his depictions of historical themes of western life, such as cowboys, Native Americans, landscapes and wildlife. He worked from artifacts, photographs and sketches, which he collected in the field.

Remington is recognized in many private collections and museums, including the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, the Whitney Museum of Western Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC.

At the age of fourteen, Johann Elias Ridinger began his artistic training with Ulm painter Christoph Resch. He moved to Augsburg around 1716 and began working in Johann Falch's studio where he produced depictions of animals, especially horses. After spending three years in Regensburg hunting game and visiting the riding school, Ridinger returned to Augsburg to learn engraving and etching from George Philipp Rugendas. In 1723, he opened an art publishing house and sold prints that he drew and engraved himself. His themes included hunting, horse breeds, riding lessons, wild animals, and zoological abnormalities. He produced over 1600 engravings of animals in a monumental style with Rococo elements. Ridinger became director of the Augsburg Stadtakademie in 1759, and his two sons continued to operate the publishing company after his death. His most popular images continued to be reprinted into the nineteenth century and were adapted for wall decorations, porcelain, and ceramics. Along with Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Ridinger is known as one of the best animal artists of the 18th century.

(Source: Weih-Kruger, Sonja. "Ridinger, Johann Elias," Grove Art Online [Accessed 15 June 2006], http://www.groveart.com/shared/views/article.html?section=art.072055.)

Peter Rindisbacher is considered the first pioneer artist of the Canadian and American West, preceeding Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, and others in the Mississippi and Missouri River Valleys by more than a decade. He was born in Switzerland and received his only art training from the Swiss painter, Jacob S. Weibel, a member of the school of Bernese miniature painters, while on vacation to the Swiss Alps along the Italian border. In 1821, his father signed up with a recruiter for the Earl of Selkirk's Red River Colony in Canada. During this time, the Selkirk settlement was along active fur trade routes but was still within hostile Indian territory as well as extremely harsh climate conditions. The 157 Swiss emigrants who made the journey from Europe to Hudson Bay and then onto the Red River Colony in present-day Manitoba were misinformed about the dangers of the expedition and the hardships that awaited them upon their arrival. During the sea voyage, Rindisbacher sketched icebergs and polar bears, and as they arrived at Resolution Island, he began sketching the Eskimos.

After reaching Hudson Bay, the colonists transferred from ships to smaller boats and had to leave most of their luggage behind, making their first winter extremely difficult. The voyage up Hayes River to Lake Winnipeg was particularly harsh; one man and six children died. However, Rindisbacher's sketches along the way are the earliest images of that part of the country. After their arrival at Fort Douglas and the Red River Colony, the Rindisbacher family stayed five years attempting to farm the land while battling hardships, such as hostile Indians, floods, insect infestation, crop diseases, prairie fires, and harsh weather conditions. During this time, Rindisbacher sold sketches and watercolors to Hudson Bay officials and the governor of the colony in order to help support his family. He used pencils, pens, and watercolors to depict Indian life, military forts, and Swiss and Scottish settlers around him. The artist kept most of his original work and made copies to sell.

After five years, the family left Canada and moved down to the Gratiot settlement in northwest Illinois where they worked in the mines and the smelter. Here Rindisbacher began painting miniature portraits on ivory of friends and neighbors. He also recorded the land cession treaty sessions between the government and the Winnebago, Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomie tribes in 1829. After the treaty settlement, he moved to St. Louis and opened a studio where he continued to paint landscapes, Indian life, and portraits. He traveled up the Missouri River on excursions with the military and was friends with several officers who promoted his work.

During his lifetime, engravings of Rindisbacher's work were published several times in the The Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, and a portfolio of six lithographs was issued in London. After his unexplained death in 1834 at the age of 28, one of his prints was used as the frontispiece for The Indian Tribes of North America (1837) and Travels in North America During the Years 1834, 1835, and 1836 (1839). Although Rindisbacher was gaining recognition as an artist, he quickly fell into obscurity after his premature death. Today, the Public Archives of Canada holds forty of his original works, the Museum at West Point possesses eighteen, and the Peabody Museum at Harvard owns six.

(Source: Josephy, Alvin M. The Artist was a Young Man: The Life Story of Peter Rindisbacher. Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 1970.)

As a child, Aiden Lassell Ripley was interested in both music and art. Although he was a talented pianist and tuba player, he decided to study art at the Fenway School of Illustration in Boston. He joined the Army during World War I and served as an infantryman and in the military band. After his discharge in 1919, Ripley returned to New England to study with Frank Benson and Philip Hale at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where he specialized in landscapes. In 1924, he received a fellowship to travel to France, the Netherlands, and North Africa for two years. After his return, landscape and portraiture sales suffered during the Great Depression. Ripley adapted to the situation by temporarily teaching at the Harvard School of Architecture and by incorporating hunting and fishing scenes into his landscapes, as sales of sporting images remained strong. He continued to focus on images of game birds and sporting scenes for the remainder of his artistic career but also created portraits and historical works on commission.

Along with Ogden Pleissner, Aiden Ripley is known as the preeminent painter of sporting scenes of the twentieth century. He worked mainly in watercolor but also in oil, etching, and drypoint. In the 1930s and 40s, he illustrated several books for Derrydale Press, and in 1942, he won the Federal Duck Stamp competition with his American Widgeon. He served as President of the of Guild of Boston Artists for ten years and was a dedicated member of the National Academy of Design, the American Watercolor Society, the Audubon Artists, the American Artists' Professional League, among others. His work can be found in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

From an early age, Auguste Rodin pursued an artistic career, though his journey toward becoming "the only sculptor of the modern age on par with Michelangelo" was not an easy one. Born in a working-class district of Paris, Rodin was the son of a clerk with the police force. He was a promising student at the Petite Ecole, which he entered at age thirteen, taking first and second prizes in 1857 for a sculpture and a drawing, respectively. However, Rodin failed to gain admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in three separate attempts; following this setback, he spent about twenty years working for various jewelers, masons and craftsmen creating decorative objects and architectural embellishments simply to earn a living. In the period of years between 1864 and 1875, Rodin studied and worked in Paris and Brussels with renowned sculptors Antoine Barye and Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. From Barye he learned to draw and model animals while attending the master's classes at the Musee de Histoire Naturelle. Carrier-Belleuse especially helped Rodin launch his professional career, as he joined with seven other leading French artists in early 1880 to petition the government for their official recognition of Rodin. Rodin would break ties with Carrier-Belleuse two years later and form a partnership with Antoine Van Rasbourg, but his former friend's influence is hard to deny; The French government was amenable to the artists' request, and quickly purchased Rodin's controversial Le Age deairain (The Age of Bronze), which had been anonymously exhibited at the 1877 Paris Salon. In August of 1880, government officials approached Rodin to create monumental bronze doors for a new decorative arts museum. The result of this commission was Rodin's now-famous Gates of Hell, which was never actually attached to the proposed museum, since plans for that institution were ultimately cancelled. (Rodin dedicated about thirty years to creating the Gates, but the work was never actually cast in bronze until 1925, eleven years after the artist's death). Greatly influenced by the Romantic movement, with its emphasis on the celebration of the natural world, Rodin's bronzes were widely recognized and criticized in their own time for their high level of realism. He often modeled the human form, and he believed in each subject's spiritual dignity, which could be revealed by close scrutiny. Often compared to Michelangelo, Rodin had spent time traveling in Italy and studying that master's work along with that of Donatello and others. He also traveled through France to visit and study the great cathedrals, which he published a book about in 1914. Italian art, Gothic cathedrals and ancient Greece were his personal interests that most profoundly affected his work.

Frederick George Richard Roth was born in the United States but attended school in Bremen, Germany. He studied art in Vienna and Berlin before returning to New York in 1900. After winning awards at several international expositions, Roth taught at the National Academy of Design, served a term as president of the National Sculpture Society, and became a member of the Society of Animal Painters and Sculptors.

Roth, who studied animals both in their natural habitat and in city zoos, became most famous for his realistic portrayal of living animals in small bronze sculptures. However, he also produced ceramic figures, tiles, and bowls and specialized in sculpting functional items as well. The National Museum of Wildlife Art has acquired such a functional work of Roth's, a pair of bronze bear bookends, in addition to several other small bronze sculptures and two woodcut prints.

As head sculptor for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, Roth also produced life-size bronze figures of both wild and domestic animals that can be found throughout the city. His most famous work, Balto, which commemorates the sled dog that delivered serum to the town of Nome, Alaska, in 1925 and saved the lives of several children, can be found in Central Park along with his monumental groups depicting Tales from Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland.

"The thing that interested me always was animals; the Fighting Panthers by Guilder and Fremet's horses and elephants. Barry [sic] did not effect me so much. He looked at the animals as a "type." I looked at them as individuals."

(Quote: Interview with Frederick George Richard Roth, 1927, NMWA Bio Files)

Little is known about the life of Georges-Frederic Rotig beyond his participation in exhibitions at the Salon of French Artists. He was born in Le Havre, France, and studied with Jules Lefebvre, Benjamin Constant, Jean-Paul Laurens, and Harman Leon. From 1894, he showed in the Salon, winning an honorable mention in 1898, third prize in 1902, second prize in 1904, and the Rosa Bonheur Prize in 1913. He also exhibited at the Society of Animal Painters and several commercial galleries and collaborated on the book, The Hunt Illustrated.

Rotig specialized in paintings of deer, wild boars, and lions. He sketched animals extensively and studied them in detail before attempting to paint them. Several of his images are dusk or nighttime scenes and depict animals in dynamic movement.

Born into a socially prominent Long Island family with several artists in its history, Charles Cary Rumsey showed an early interest in art and in animals. When his parents gave him his own horse as a child, he impressed them with his skill in sculpting the creature. Fortunately, Rumsey's family encouraged his talent in sculpture, and at only fourteen years of age, he was permitted to remain in Paris following a family vacation to apprentice under the renowned American sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett for two years. This experience under Bartlett's tutelage served as a valuable supplement to his traditional education in America, which continued at the Nichols School in Buffalo upon his return home in 1895. In 1898, Rumsey began studies at Harvard University, taking summer classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1901, before he had completed his schooling, Rumsey exhibited work at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

Upon his graduation from Harvard in 1902, Bela Lyon Pratt, an artist he had studied under in Boston, convinced Rumsey to return to Paris. While he remained in the French capital for only four years, Rumsey made the most of his time there; he set up a studio in the city's Latin Quarter, studied at the Julian and Colarossi Academies, and worked under famous animalier sculptor, Emmanuel Fremiet. A talented athlete, he also gained minor fame as an amateur boxer in Paris and established himself as an internationally ranked polo player.

Horses were central to Rumsey's life, and he expressed his love by continually returning to these animals as subject matter throughout his sculpting career; he was also known for his depictions of polo players, Native American warriors, Spanish "conquistadors" (believed responsible for introducing some of the first horses to America), and large game animals. Rumsey was often commissioned to create his equestrian images for wealthy fellow horse enthusiasts, though he also received public commissions for monumental installations. His Buffalo Hunt frieze, completed in 1916 on New York City's Manhattan Bridge, is Rumsey's best-known work of this type.

An organizer of and participant in the groundbreaking Armory Show of 1913 in New York, Rumsey exhibited regularly while he was still living. He took time away from his career and family life in 1917 and 1918 to return to France and fight as a United States Army cavalry officer in World War I. Tragically, Rumsey was killed in an automobile accident in 1922. Since his death, however, his work has been featured in exhibitions of American sculpture at a wide variety of museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The subject of a 1983 retrospective at the Burchfield Center in Buffalo, NY, examples of Rumsey's work can today be found all over the world.

Carl Rungius studied at the Berlin Art Academy between 1888 and 1890. While in hometown, he frequently sketched animals at the Berlin Zoo. His dedication to painting animals with anatomical accuracy coupled with his determination to learn and paint each animal's mannerisms and habitat made Rungius a well-respected wildlife artist. Rungius first visited the United States in 1894, and traveled to Cora, Wyoming, to hunt and sketch. Rungius decided to remain in the United States spending the next decade of summers in Wyoming and the remainder of the year in his New York studio. During this time, he painted and hunted western big game animals, including moose, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep in the Rocky Mountains, and he completed these paintings during the long New York winters.

Rungius' reputation as a premier wildlife artist was enhanced considerably by an expedition to the Yukon Territory in 1905. The artwork and social connections that resulted from that trip launched Rungius into the center of America's conservation movement, promoted by such famous American sportsmen as President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1910 he accepted an offer to visit the Canadian Rockies. The opportunities to hunt, explore, and paint the region were so appealing that in 1921 he built a summer studio called "The Paintbox" in Banff, where he worked from April to October of each year until his death in 1959.

Rungius' ability to capture the heart-stopping chance encounter between man and animal sets him apart from many of his talented colleagues. Equally accomplished as a painter of wildlife and landscapes, Rungius quickly developed an enthusiastic following among fellow artists and patrons. The National Museum of Wildlife Art maintains the largest public collection of Rungius' work in the United States.

Charles Russell is one of the few artists who experienced American West as well as artistically documented the drama and innocence of the era. As the West was settled, his nostalgia for days gone by was expressed in his depictions of contemporary life on the range.

As a self-taught artist, Russell began drawing and sculpting at an early age. A few weeks before his sixteenth birthday, he left St. Louis and moved to Montana where he worked as a cowboy for eleven years. During those years, he sketched and painted the cowboy life and the wilderness he loved. To cover his expenses, Russell sold his paintings for modest prices to saloons and local establishments, whose proprietors were the first Russell collectors. His first commissioned mural was painted for a saloon in Utica, Montana, and was executed with house paints on a pine board.

In 1896, Russell married Nancy Cooper, who made a lucrative impact on his artistic career as his business manager. She convinced him to raise prices and paint full-time. By 1911, his paintings were selling in the East for what Russell referred to as "dead men's prices," high figures normally achieved after an artist’s death. After 1919, the Russells spent their winters in Pasadena, California. In Hollywood, they befriended western art enthusiasts, many of whom became Russell's patrons. In October 1926, Charles Russell died in Great Falls, Montana.