Bugbee murals on display at PPHM

The Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum (PPHM) at Canyon is exhibiting Those Who Came Before Us: The Indian Murals of H.D. Bugbee, which the Clarendon artist painted in the early 1950s. 

The exhibition will include Bugbee’s original thirteen murals for the Museum’s then-Indian Hall, plus three Indian dance murals he added to cycle later, and sketches and studies (some made in the 1920s) for the murals.  Much like Charles M. Russell, Bugbee’s idol-who depicted life on the northern Great Plains in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Bugbee 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, William N. Lewis’s Between Sun and Sod, and S. Omar Barkers’ Songs of the Saddleman and others.  He also continued to make easel paintings.

Under President 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 Old Tascosa Room in the Herring Hotel; Amarillo Army Air Field (which now hangs at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum); and a set of murals on Native American life for the Museum.

Bugbee exhibited at the Tri-State Fair at Amarillo annually, the Fort Worth Frontier Centennial Exposition in 1936, the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition in Dallas in 1937, and in the annual West Texas art exhibitions at Fort Worth.  He also had numerous solo exhibitions in Texas, including 1930 venues at Amarillo and Clarendon, and exhibited at Taos.  In 1952 Bugbee became the first Curator of Art at PPHM, a position he held until his death. Over 250 Bugbee works – drawings, paintings, and sculpture – are part of the Society’s art collection.

The exhibition will run through September 15, 2001, in the Harrington Exhibit Gallery, and reproductions of Bugbee’s work will be available in the Museum Store.