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At the suggestion of his cousin, cattleman T. S.
Bugbee, Harold Dow Bugbee came to Clarendon
in the Texas Panhandle from Lexington,
Massachusetts (where he was born on August
15, 1900), with his parents in 1914. He studied
at Texas A&M College in 1917 and the Cumming
School of Art in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1920.
Each fall, until the late 1930s, Bugbee 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.
Advised by Panhandle-Plains cattlemen Frank
Collinson and Charles Goodnight and inspired
by the example of his idol, Charles M.
Russell, Bugbee portrayed historic and then-contemporary
Southern Plains life, including
cowboys, Native Americans, and flora and
fauna of the region.
By the mid-1920s galleries in Denver, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York handled Bugbee's work. In 1933, with the Great Depression and decreasing picture sales, Bugbee turned to magazine illustration, a practice he maintained for some eighteen years. He did pen-and-ink illustrations for
Under 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 Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. He exhibited at the Tri- State Fair at Amarillo, the 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 in Fort Worth. He also had numerous solo exhibitions in Texas and exhibited in Taos. In 1951 Bugbee became the first curator of art at Panhandle-Plains, a position he held until his death at Clarendon on March 27, 1963. More than 230 Bugbee works are part of the museum's collection.