Richard Kruger (1875-1965) California, Oil. Signed lower left. Landscape painter Richard Kruger was born of American parents in Zittau, Germany, near the Polish border in 1875, although some references on the artist show his birth date as 1880 or 1885. Some scholars also identify his birth place as Poland or Russia. However most commentators agree that he was initially trained as a physician before he entered art school at the Dresden Academy of Fine Art where a Richard Kruger was recorded as studying with academic masters including Richard Tuetter and Alois Hans Schram whose career ended in 1919. In 1895, US immigration records for the year record that Kruger first emigrated to New York City. Within the year he decided to head to the American West after hearing about it and seeing its great landscape vistas and the heterogeneity of its terrain represented in paintings in the showrooms of several New York galleries and critically praised in the major newspapers of New York City. Overall size: 26 1/2 x 36 in. Sight size: 19 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.