Harold Dow Bugbee

(2) Harold Dow Bugbee (August 15, 1900 – March 27, 1963) was an American Western artist, illustrator, painter, and curator of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas.

[1] In annual trips to Taos, Bugbee painted with W. Herbert Dunton, Leon Gaspard, Frank Hoffman, and Ralph Meyers.

His early patron was Ernest O. Thompson,[4] a hotel owner, Amarillo mayor, and later, long-serving member of the Texas Railroad Commission.

[5] In 1933, Bugbee began illustrating pen-and-ink sketches for books, magazines such as Ranch Romances, Western Stories, Country Gentleman, and Field and Stream,[3] and also historical editions of local and regional newspapers.

Another artist featured at Panhandle-Plains was Frank Reaugh, an Illinois native, who painted scenes similar to those adopted by Bugbee.

Bugbee sold or donated more than 230 paintings, drawings, and prints to the society's museum in Canyon,[8] the seat of Randall County south of Amarillo.

Bugbee completed 22 murals on Indian life[3] and ranching for the museum, the greatest of which is The Cattleman (1934), underwritten with a grant from the Federal Arts Project of the New Deal.

[12] He painted three murals for Amarillo Army Air Field in 1943; two of the three are in the National Museum of American Art, a part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Olive, an artist in her own right, whose clients included U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe of Uvalde, did not remarry.

[1] His exhibits were presented in 1992 at the Nita Stewart Haley Library at Midland and in 1993 at the Cattleman's Museum] in Fort Worth.