Wildlife Art on View > The Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio is set to open a major loan exhibition titled “Survival of the Fittest: Envisioning Wildlife and Wilderness with the Big Four,” from June 14 through September 8, 2024.
On view will be more than 50 works created by a quartet of masters who rewrote the book — so to speak — on the painting of wildlife worldwide. They were the German-American artist Carl Rungius (1869–1959), the Germans Richard Friese (1854–1918) and Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865–1926), and Sweden’s Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939).
Part of a remarkable generation, they are especially admired for their unprecedented ability to show creatures in their natural habitat, integrating them into the greater whole rather than isolating them like anatomical specimens.
These works have been borrowed from the only two museums anywhere that own masterpieces by every member of this elite: the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, Netherlands, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming.
Located along the San Antonio River Walk, the Briscoe’s main building was constructed in the 1930s as a public library. After an extensive renovation, the museum opened in 2013. The institution is named in honor of the late Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe, Jr., and his wife, Janey Slaughter Briscoe, who envisioned a museum that would share the story of Western heritage and the extraordinary people behind it. The institution has recently produced the first publication surveying its growing permanent collection.
For more details, please visit briscoemuseum.org.
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