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Overview
Frank Reaugh (1860–1945; pronounced “Ray”) was called “the Dean of Texas artists” for good reason. His pastels documented the wide-open spaces of the West as they were vanishing in the late nineteenth century, and his plein air techniques influenced generations of artists. His students include a “Who’s Who” of twentieth-century Texas painters: Alexandre Hogue, Reveau Bassett, and Lucretia Coke, among others. He was an advocate of painting by observation, and encouraged his students to do the same by organizing legendary sketch trips to West Texas. Reaugh also earned the title of Renaissance man by inventing a portable easel that allowed him to paint in high winds, and developing a formula for pastels, which he marketed. A founder of the Dallas Art Society, which became the Dallas Museum of Art, Reaugh was central to Dallas and Oak Cliff artistic circles for many years until infighting and politics drove him out of fashion. He died isolated and poor in 1945. The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in Reaugh, through gallery shows, exhibitions, and a recent documentary. Despite his importance and this growing public profile, however, Rounded Up in Glory is the first full-length biography. Michael Grauer argues for Reaugh’s importance as more than just a “longhorn painter.” Reaugh’s works and far-reaching imagination earned him a prominent place in the Texas art pantheon.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781574416336 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of North Texas Press |
| Publication date: | 07/22/2016 |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d) |
About the Author
MICHAEL GRAUER is the Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs/Curator of Art of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, which holds the largest public collection of Reaugh’s works. His articles on Reaugh have appeared in the American Art Review,The Pastel Journal, and the recently released Windows on the West: The Art of Frank Reaugh, companion to the Harry Ransom Center’s current exhibit. He lives in Canyon, Texas.
Read an Excerpt
Rounded Up in Glory
Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man
By Michael R. Grauer
University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2016 Michael R. GrauerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57441-633-6
CHAPTER 1
Art in Texas, 1836–1890
TEXAS WAS NOT A HOTBED for art-making nor for art appreciation between the founding of the Republic of Texas (1836) and the centennial of the United States (1876), the same year Frank Reaugh arrived in the Lone Star State. Frances Battaile Fisk, one of the earliest Texas-art historians, placed the beginning of Texas's art history proper at 1888 "with the painting of the Presidents of the Republic of Texas and the Governors of the State, and of vast historical subjects, and of the erection of monuments and statues ... Texans of earlier generations were too occupied with the development of material resources, following the struggle for independence, to have any leisure for the enjoyment of beauty."
Esse Forrester-O'Brien put things a bit more graphically for the history of art-making in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas: "In the days when the Indians ruled the land, the story goes that while an unknown artisan was yet carving on the great door to LaSalle's fort, Fort St. Louis, on Lavaca Bay, Texas, the Indians smote him down. Art is especially slow where scalping is in style."
In spite of pioneer preoccupations — including never-ending threats from American Indians, primarily Comanches and their Southern Plains allies — there was art activity in some areas of Texas, centering around Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Itinerant portrait painters, artist/explorers, survey artists, and, later in the century, academically trained artists who established permanent or semi-permanent residence, comprised the artistic community of the Republic and State of Texas, until 1889.
However, none of these earlier artists had any real effect on Frank Reaugh when he arrived in Texas in 1876, nor until he moved to Oak Cliff, near Dallas, in 1890. Nevertheless, Reaugh's artistic milieu, his arena, was the cow country west of Fort Worth, from the Rio Grande to the North Canadian River. Here some artists found purchase and an area fecund for artistic exploration, albeit chiefly for government-issued reports. When Frank Reaugh first sketched in "Western Texas" in 1883, he found trail already broken in the region.
The Southern Plains of the United States was not the "Great American Desert" described by Major Stephen H. Long in his An Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819, 1820. Instead it was (and is) a fertile grassland capable of sustaining millions of Bison bison (American Buffalo), despite periodic drought. Waves of first Paleo Indians, followed by sedentary farmers such as the Antelope Creek Culture, who were, in turn, displaced by Apaches, whom Comanches drove west and southwest by 1750, inhabited this "desert."
Through trade agreements with other native groups to the east and west, Spaniards out of New Mexico and Texas, and French traders from Louisiana Territory, from about 1750 to 1850 Comanches controlled virtually everything south of the South Platte River to the northern states of Mexico, and from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the west to the Mississippi Valley in the east. Scholars today refer to this vast region as Comancheria, using the terminology applied to the area by Spanish officials to the frontier of New Spain. After obtaining the horse in about 1700, Comanches became supreme stockmen, raising enormous herds of horses. At one time Comanches could claim four horses per capita. The Comanche horse-trading network extended into the Dakotas as far north as the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the upper Missouri River. While maintaining a horse-driven Great Plains culture, hunting buffalo and living in tipis, northern Plains tribes such as the Sioux and Blackfeet relied on Comanche horses. The cold in the north often killed horses on the northern Plains, so Comanches cornered the market. To the east, the Kansa, Pawnee, and Osage also needed Comanche horses, and traded goods and foodstuffs unavailable to Comanches. Texas Indians such as Wacos, Tawakonis, and Wichitas were also part of this network. Likewise pueblos in today's New Mexico provided Comanches with corn, beans, and squash, through trade for horses, buffalo hides, tallow, and meat. Eventually, Comanches became welcome at Taos Pueblo's annual trade fair for example; even today, Taos Indians perform a form of the "Comanche Dance" during their annual rituals.
Beginning in 1786, after the governor of the Province of Nuevo México, Juan Bautista de Anza, struck a treaty with Comanches, Hispanic hunters began hunting buffalo on the Llano Estacado with less fear of attack. Comanches agreed to allow Spanish (then Mexican) hunters (ciboleros) to hunt buffalo on Comancheria. These hunting parties usually came from north-central New Mexico, from Taos to Belen and brought chiles, corn, beans, and squash, to trade with Comanches. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which saw the forcible removal of American Indians from the southeastern United States to Arkansas Territory, Comanches allowed displaced members of the "Five Civilized Tribes" to hunt buffalo on the Comancheria. Likewise, Pawnee, Osage, Kansa, and other Indians struck hunting agreements with Comanches. During the drought of the 1840s and 1850s on the southern Great Plains, Comanche horse herds competed with bison for the remaining grass, and buffalo died by the hundreds. By the 1850s, Comanches were taking, and allowing to be taken, about 300,000 American buffalo per year, contributing to the near extinction of the species.
Eventually, Comanches came to depend on goods and foodstuffs from other native and non-Comanche groups. For example, Comanche trade for firearms, shot, and powder, resulted in them having more of this materiel than the Spanish and Mexicans had on their own frontiers. This dependence on Euro-American and native material goods eventually contributed to the Comanche downfall. By 1875, Comancheria was no more.
Nevertheless, the fear of Comanche reprisals and uprisings lasted in West Texas even after Frank Reaugh began sketching the region and almost into the twentieth century. The "Great Panhandle Indian Scare of 1891" is the best example of this.
These waves of Native Americans left multiple examples of their cultures across the region. Excavations at archaeological sites reveal the material culture of paleo and historic camps and settlements, as well as vast trade routes to the southwest using Alibates flint — or access to it — as currency. But the petroglyphs and pictograph sites that dot the region are the most concrete evidences of these cultures. Through his many travels across the region, particularly into hard-to-reach places, Frank Reaugh had ample opportunity to encounter and contemplate the multi-layered sophistication of this non-European art-making tradition. By the early 1830s, Euro-American artists began making inroads into the Southern Plains, including the Llano Estacado in today's Texas, eastern New Mexico, and western Oklahoma.
George Catlin (1796–1872) probably never painted in recognized Texas proper, although he is usually included in histories of early art production in the Mexican state of Coahuila y. Tejas. In early 1834 Catlin traveled to Fort Gibson, then in Arkansas Territory (later Indian Territory) near present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma, so as to paint Indians in the area and on the southern plains to the west. The artist had already created a significant body of work by traveling up the Missouri River to the mouth of the Yellowstone River in 1832, painting portraits of American Indians and landscapes of the region along the way.
Catlin arrived in Arkansas Territory on the heels of the enforcement of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. For two months he painted Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Osages, and members of other tribes near Fort Gibson, and in June set out with a company of U.S. Army dragoons hoping to encounter Kiowas, Comanches, Wacos, and Wichitas (then called Pawnee Picts). The company marched in a southwesterly direction, stopping near the juncture of the Washita and Red Rivers, near present-day Ardmore, Oklahoma, and Catlin remarked that they could see Texas on the opposite bank. Then the party set out to the northwest, finally encountering Comanches. At a Comanche village at the base of the Wichita Mountains, near present-day Lawton, Oklahoma, Catlin was forced to remain because of sickness (probably malaria), while the rest of the company traveled farther west, almost certainly into today's Texas Panhandle. Nevertheless, his Comanche Village, Women Dressing Robes and Drying Meat is likely one of the first paintings of Comanches from life. His written description is equally important to scholars, and to this discussion on Frank Reaugh, as Reaugh would visit, sketch, and photograph the same environs some 60 years later: "The village of the Camanchees [sic] ... is composed of six or eight hundred skin-covered lodges, made of poles and buffalo skins, in the manner precisely as those of the Sioux and other Missouri [River] tribes ... In the view I have made of it, but a small portion of the village is shewn ..."
Catlin was forced to rely on sketches of "Kioways and Wicos" done by a comrade, Joseph Chadwick, for his later paintings from Texas. Catlin completed his Comanche Indians Chasing Buffalo with Lances and Bows and Elk and Buffalo Making Acquaintance, Texas, between 1846 and 1848 while in Paris as he toured his "Indian Gallery" in Europe.
From 1845 to 1869, the U.S. government sent engineers trained in watercolor painting as well as artists to Texas and Indian Territory to investigate conditions, gather information, and create a visual record of the region. These "recorders" included Lt. James W. Abert, Heinrich Balduin Mollhausen, Vincent Colyer, and Lt. E. H. Ruffner. While their work may have had limited exposure in their own time, still their contributions offer a more complete picture of early West Texas art in the mid-nineteenth century.
On 12 August 1845, Lt. James W. Abert (1820–1897) took an expedition of 32 men from Bent's Fort in southern Colorado, south across Raton Pass, then east to the Canadian River. He and his party followed the Canadian east and by early September entered the northern part of the Llano Estacado. Trailed and scouted by Comanches the entire way, Abert and his men also encountered Kiowas. By mid-September Abert's party had turned south to the "False Washita" River (now simply Washita), following it east-southeast into then-Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The expedition surmounted the Cross Timbers in Indian Territory and arrived at Fort Gibson, I.T. by late October. Abert's watercolors, although somewhat naïve and even crude, preserved some of the earliest images of the peoples inhabiting the Llano Estacado in the mid-1840s.
The earliest known images of Palo Duro Canyon are from military expeditions searching for the source of the Red River. In March 1852, Mexican War veteran and trailblazer Captain Randolph Marcy was assigned the command of a 70-man exploring expedition across the Great Plains in search of the source of the Red River and was directed to "collect and report everything that may be useful or interesting." Marcy's party crossed a thousand miles of previously undocumented Texas and present-day Oklahoma, discovering valuable mineral deposits and new species of mammals and reptiles. He reportedly was the first white man to find the sources of both forks of the Red River and explore Palo Duro Canyon. Marcy's 1852 expedition has been called the most significant of his career and "the best organized, best conducted, and most successful" venture into the region to that date. His report on the expedition, Exploration of the Red River of Louisiana, In the Year 1852 ... With Reports on the Natural History of the Country, published in 1853 and including the first known images of Palo Duro Canyon, has become a classic of Western Americana. Unfortunately, the original drawings and watercolors published in Marcy's report are lost.
Artist-scientist Heinrich Balduin Mollhausen (1825–1905), something of a protégé of Alexander von Humboldt, joined the 35th parallel Pacific railroad survey under Lt. Amiel Whipple, in 1853. Starting from Fort Smith, Arkansas, the party set out in July 1853 along the Canadian River following the track of previous surveys. Mollhausen sketched the scenery along the route and "drew most of the illustrations for the final report." His somewhat fantastical chromolithographs — taken from his watercolors — of the landscapes in the northern Texas Panhandle along the Canadian are probably the earliest views recorded by a Euro-American artist. Mollhausen returned to Germany and published a recollection of his Western travels, and became known there as the "German Fenimore Cooper."
In spring 1869, landscape painter Vincent Colyer (1825–1888) traveled across Indian Territory from Fort Gibson, on assignment from the newly created Board of Indian Commissioners (BIC). Congress created the Board in April 1869 to aid in developing a more humane federal strategy toward American Indians and its efforts helped form President Ulysses S. Grant's "peace policy." Colyer's 1869 assignment from the Board was to ascertain conditions among Indians on the Southern Plains and in New Mexico Territory. Later, he traveled to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska on a similar assignment.
Among American artists, Colyer was in a unique position to advise the BIC, as he had served on the U.S. Christian Commission during the Civil War. A Quaker born in Bloomingdale, New York, he became a serious artist, being elected as associate of the National Academy of Design where had also studied. He exhibited large paintings from his sketches of the West at the National Academy of Design (NAD) and the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876. After the Indian Wars, Colyer focused on the Connecticut landscape for the remainder of his career. However, his watercolor and pencil sketches of the American West have become treasured as early documents of rarely depicted parts of the United States during this time.
Colyer stayed at Camp Supply on his way through Indian Territory and he sketched and interviewed the Arapaho leaders Yellow Bear and Little Raven, and Cheyennes who had witnessed the Battle of the Washita. His excursion took him near enough to sketch the Antelope Hills and Medicine Bluff, both sacred to Southern Plains tribes. His On the Big Canadian River, May 1869, may be the earliest known painting of the Texas Panhandle and his paintings of western Indian Territory are almost certainly the earliest images after George Catlin's trip through Arkansas Territory in 1834.
In June 1874 Billy Dixon, Bat Masterson, and the other 28 buffalo hunters (and one woman) at Adobe Walls in today's Hutchinson County Texas weren't terribly concerned about the first Impressionist exhibition held in Paris in April of that year. In fact the furor over the newest French art movement — and any art news for that matter — paled in comparison to their focus on the 300–600 Southern Plains Indians descending upon the trading post about 4:00 a.m. on 27 June. Art and culture were not on these buffalo hunters' minds. This fight precipitated the Red River War in the fall of 1874 and early part of 1875 and opened the region to American settlement. The first three towns to be founded in the Texas Panhandle between 1876 and 1880 were Mobeetie, Tascosa, and Clarendon. Mobeetie was founded to cater to the needs of soldiers at Fort Elliott, established in the aftermath of the Red River War. Tascosa was a cowtown. Clarendon was a Methodist community also called "Saints Roost" by cowboys of the region.
In June 1876, Lieutenant Ernest H. Ruffner (1845–1937), Kentucky native, West Point graduate, and chief engineer of the Department of the Missouri, led a topographical survey of the headwaters of the Red River in the Texas Panhandle. The six-week survey began at Fort Elliott (near present-day Mobeetie, Texas) and followed Palo Duro Canyon to the junction of Tierra Blanca and Palo Duro creeks, then turned southeast to Tule Creek. Ruffner and his crew arrived back at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on 30 June. Like many army engineers, Ruffner was a proficient watercolorist. He completed his Red River, the oldest extant painting of Palo Duro Canyon, on 12 June 1876 probably near the mouth of Tule Canyon. Carl Julius Adolph Hunnius, a civilian draftsman on the survey, kept a detailed diary of the expedition, including some drawings of Palo Duro.
Three artists whose names have become synonymous with early Texas painting, Henry Arthur McArdle, William Henry Huddle, and Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, all arrived in Texas between 1865 and 1880. McArdle (1836–1907) and Huddle (1847–1892) had virtually no impact on Reaugh, while Robert J. Onderdonk certainly did.
Robert Jenkins Onderdonk (1852–1917) was the only earlier Texas artist with whom Frank Reaugh may have had direct contact. Robert Onderdonk, father of the better known Robert Julian Onderdonk (1882–1922), was born in Catonsville, Maryland. Like William Henry Huddle, Onderdonk enrolled at the National Academy of Design during its financial difficulties and was part of the original class of the Art Students League. Onderdonk studied under William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), Walter Shirlaw (1838~1909), James Carroll Beckwith (1852–1917), and Alexander Helwig Wyant (1836–1892). Drawn to San Antonio in 1879 (three years after Reaugh had arrived in Texas) by the promise of portrait commissions, Onderdonk quickly became an artist, and person, of importance in that city. Although the portrait commissions were not as forthcoming as he would have liked, Onderdonk supplemented his income by teaching art. He was an influential member of the San Antonio art community, and in 1886 was instrumental in founding the Van Dyke Art Club. His reputation apparently spread throughout Texas, and in 1889, while Reaugh was in Europe, Onderdonk was invited to Dallas by art enthusiasts there. Ironically, Onderdonk took up residence in Oak Cliff in July 1889, a year before Reaugh moved to that community near Dallas. Onderdonk taught art in Dallas as well as assisting with the annual state fair's art department, a duty which he shared with Reaugh in 1904. By 1896, Onderdonk was resettled in San Antonio.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rounded Up in Glory by Michael R. Grauer. Copyright © 2016 Michael R. Grauer. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
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Table of Contents
Donors viii
List of Illustrations ix
"Rounded Up in Glory" xiii
Prelude xv
Acknowledgements xix
Introduction 1
1 Art in Texas, 1836-1890 4
2 Learning the Ropes 16
3 1890-1900: Success 87
4 1900-1910: National Attention Colorplates 123
5 1910-1920: New Pursuits 153
6 1920-1930: Turning Point 174
7 1930-1940: Betrayal 224
8 1940-1945: Slow Fade 261
9 Conclusion 266
Appendix: Legacy 293
Endnotes 315
Bibliography 359
Index 377
Interviews
Canyon, Texas