Bugbee art to be displayed at Canyon

The work of one of Clarendon’s most acclaimed talents will be celebrated next month in Canyon.

Clarendon artist H.D. Bugbee in his studio in about 1925.
Photo courtesy Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum
 
The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum will open a retrospective of the Southwestern artist H.D. Bugbee on September 9, 2000. 

To observe the 100th anniversary of Bugbee’s birth, the museum will bring together 100 of Bugbee’s finest works in oil, watercolor, pen-and-ink, and sculpture. 

Bugbee, who lived much of his life in Clarendon, portrayed historic and then-contemporary Southern Plains life, including cowboys, American Indians, and flora and fauna of the region.

At the suggestion of his cousin, cattleman T.S. Bugbee, Harold Dow Bugbee came to the Texas Panhandle from Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1914 with his parents.  He studied at Texas A&M College in 1917 and the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1920.

Advised by cattlemen Frank Collinson and Charles Goodnight, Bugbee rendered the landscape and wildlife of the Texas Panhandle, as well as nostalgic paintings of Indians and cowboys.  Each fall, until the late 1930s, the artist traveled to Taos to paint with his fellow artists “Buck” Dunton, Frank Hoffman, Leon Gaspard, and Ralph Meyers, often packing into the mountains to paint with either Meyers or Dunton.

By the mid-1920s, galleries in Denver, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York handled Bugbee’s work.  With the Depression and decreasing picture sales, in 1933 Bugbee turned to magazine illustration, a practice he maintained for some eighteen years.  He did pen-and-ink illustrations for Ranch Romances, Western Stories, Country Gentleman, and Field and Stream, among others.  Additionally, Bugbee also illustrated a number of significant books on Western history including J. Evetts Haley’s Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman, Willie N. Lewis’s Between Sun and Sod, and S. Omar Barker’s Songs of the Saddleman and others.  He also continued to make easel paintings.

Under Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Bugbee painted the first of five murals for the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum’s Pioneer Hall in 1934.  He later painted additional murals for the Amarillo Army Air Field and a set of murals on Native American life for the museum.

Bugbee exhibited at the Tri-State Fair at Amarillo, Fort Worth Frontier Centennial Exposition in 1936, the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition at Dallas in 1937, and in the annual West Texas art exhibitions at Fort Worth.  He also had numerous solo exhibitions in Texas and exhibited at Taos.

In 1951, Bugbee became the first Curator of Art of Panhandle-Plains, a position he held until his death.  Over two hundred thirty Bugbee works are part of the Museum’s art.  Exhibits of Bugbee’s illustrated letters, his work in Taos, NM, and his illustrations for J. Evetts Haley’s books will be ancillary to the larger retrospective.

H.D. Bugbee: 100 at 100 will include works from the museum’s collection as well as objects from public and private collections across the United States.  The exhibition will run through February 18, 2001.