By Frank Reaugh
Located in San Antonio, TX
Frank Reaugh
(1860-1945)
Dallas Artist
Image Size: 3 3/4 x 5 1/2
Frame Size: 15 x 18
Medium: Pastel on paperboard
Circa 1881
"Residence At Terrell" From the collection of Lucretia Coke. Signed F.R. Lower Left & S7
On Verso 1881 or 2, 2 or 3 miles from next house.
Frank Reaugh (1860-1945)
Charles Franklin Reaugh.
THE FRANK REAUGH GALLERY AT THE PANHANDLE-PLAINS HISTORICAL MUSEUM
by Michael R. Grauer, Curator of Art, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum
Called the pejorative "Rembrandt of the Longhorn" and "Longhorn Leonardo," and the gentler "Painter to the Longhorns," Charles Franklin "Frank" Reaugh was a master pastellist unparalleled in Texas and the greater Southwest. While he advertised himself as a "landscape and cattle painter" and insisted he was the historian of the Texas longhorn, he has effectively, and unfortunately, pigeonholed his art.
More appropriately, Frank Reaugh is often called the "Dean of Texas Painters." His name is synonymous with the "old guard" of Texas art history, along with Robert Onderdonk, Hermann Lungkwitz, William Henry Huddle, Henry McArdle, and others.
Reaugh's paintings focused on the landscape of the American West generally, and the American Southwest, specifically. He captured subtleties in a land of high contrast where others only saw the rawness. He painted the overwhelmingly blue sky, the illimitable plains, and the great gashes in the land that are called canyons, arroyos, or breaks in the West. And he painted the Texas longhorn, or Texas cattle, as he referred to them.
Usually no more important than the mesquite, yucca, sagebrush, and cholla that also populate his compositions of the Western landscape, the Texas longhorn became his recognized symbol. Today, some commercial galleries even insist that one of his works is more valuable if it has a cow in it! These commercial zealots in their search for a longhorn often overlook the beauty of his landscapes; they cannot see the landscape for the longhorns.
Born near Jacksonville, Illinois in 1860, Reaugh first came to Texas in a wagon in 1876 at the age of fifteen. He moved with his parents to a farm near Terrell, Texas, until 1890 when they moved to Dallas and settled in what is now the Oak Cliff area.
Reaugh had no formal education but fared well without it for his mother, Clarinda Reaugh, was his teacher in all things. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, his mother instilled in her only child an appreciation of nature, grounded in her own readings in zoology, botany, and natural history. Her teachings were infused with the philosophies of the famed Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz and John Burroughs, supporter and contemporary of Walt Whitman, who wrote extensively on his symbiotic relationship with nature. Clarinda Reaugh also encouraged her son's interest in drawing through her own interest in the fine arts.
Reaugh's father, George Washington Reaugh, was a mechanic, carpenter, cabinetmaker, and farmer, who had participated in the Gold Rush of 1849. It was from his father that Reaugh learned to be extremely adept with his hands, and later made his own picture frames and patented several inventions. George Reaugh's sense of adventure may have spurred his son's annual trips to West Texas and beyond, which began in the early 1880s.
Reaugh's first exposure to art came through reproductions in popular magazines such as Harper's, Scribner's, and Century Illustrated. Rosa Bonheur's Horsefair, the Dutch painter Paulus Potter's Young Bull, and the landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church and J. M. W. Turner were favorites of his. (In fact, his late works are often especially reminiscent of Church and Turner.) From these early reproductions in black and white, Reaugh learned well the lessons of value and composition.
While he studied and copied magazine reproductions, Reaugh also became interested in bovine anatomy. Using a "two-bit" book on cattle and sheep anatomy as his text, the young artist collected bones near the Reaugh farm and made measurements from family livestock. He supplemented his scientific studies with sketches made from longhorn cattle brought up from South Texas to fatten on grass nearby.
In the early 1880s, Reaugh met two cattlemen, Frank and Romeo Houston, who had interests throughout North Texas, and accompanied them on cattle drives and roundups near present-day Wichita Falls and in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). His first documented trip to Western Texas came in 1883; probably near present day Wichita Falls and Henrietta, Texas.
Reaugh made numerous sketches during these trips, often from the saddle, and later enlarged and composed them in the studio. His field sketches resulted in his first two pastel masterpieces, Watering the Herd (1889) and The One-O Roundup (1894). and his oil The Approaching Herd (1902). These trips with the Houstons, begun as early as 1883, spurred a wanderlust for West Texas that lured Reaugh until he was nearly eighty.
Reaugh took his first formal art training at the Saint Louis Museum and School of Fine Arts during the winter of 1884-85. He spent most of his time there drawing from plaster casts of Greek, Roman, and Italian sculpture and possibly live models. Reaugh also met Halsey C. Ives, director of the school, who lectured on avant-garde art trends in Europe, particularly French Impressionism. Later, Ives was instrumental in the acceptance of Reaugh's work for display at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in Saint Louis in 1904.
Following his studies at Saint Louis, Reaugh returned to Terrell and began teaching art to young ladies in the area. He supplemented his art classes with a stint at teaching public school, and by November 1888 had saved enough money for a trip to Europe.
Upon arriving at Paris, Reaugh enrolled at the Academie Julian, a school very popular with international students, especially Americans. He drew and painted from the figure while at the Academie under Jules Lefebvre, John-Joseph Benjamin Constant, and Henri-Lucien Douciet, all members of the "juste milieu" in France. Reaugh studied at the Academie for half of each day then supplemented his formal instruction by making copies of or studying paintings in the Louvre and the Luxembourg Palace.
Logically he was especially drawn to the pastels in what he later called the 'pastel room' in the Louvre. In his 1927 pamphlet, Pastel, Reaugh wrote of the pastel painters he saw in the gallery: "[John] Russell, of England, and [Maurice-Quentin de] La Tour, [Jean Etienne] Liotard, [Jean Simeon] Chardin, and [Madame Vigee] Le [sic] Brun. These were great painters. . .the work of all of them may be seen in the pastel room of the Louvre, as fresh and bright, apparently, as on the day it was done." In addition to the pastellists he mentioned, Reaugh also saw pastels in the Louvre by Rosalba Carriera, Francois Boucher, and Pierre Paul Prudhon.
At the end of March 1889, Reaugh traveled through Belgium and Holland, studying paintings of the Flemish and Dutch schools, and particularly those of The Hague School, of which Anton Mauve was a part. He returned to Paris in time to see the Exposition Universelle, at which paintings by French Impressionists Cezanne, Manet, Monet, and Pissarro were exhibited. This may have been Reaugh's initial exposure to Impressionism. Reaugh returned to Texas at the end of May 1889.
Between 1890 and 1915, Frank Reaugh enjoyed his greatest success as an artist. He exhibited works at two world's fairs: the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. He also exhibited at the prestigious National Academy of Design at New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at Philadelphia, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Moreover, Reaugh became a member of the Society of Western Artists and exhibited with that group all over the United States. Finally, Reaugh toured his pastels with much success, especially in the upper Midwest.
Simultaneously, Reaugh continued his trips to the West and, beginning in the 1890s, he started using a camera as a sketching tool. He photographed the landscape as well as cattle, and in 1893 photographed in Palo Duro Canyon; perhaps his first trip to the 'Grand Canyon of Texas'.
After 1900, Reaugh turned his genius to inventing and patented several devices including a folding lap easel, a water pump, and a cooling mechanism for internal combustion engines, among other things. He also patented Reaugh Pastels, using a formula he developed and shaped into an octagonal-shape stick for easier gripping. Allegedly, either John Singer Sargent or William Merritt Chase used Reaugh Pastels.
Reaugh also became more active in Dallas art and civic circles. After first offering private art lessons, he organized the Dallas School of Fine Arts in 1899. He urged Dallas to build the city's first art gallery in 1900, to which he donated a painting, and helped found the Dallas Art Association in 1903. Furthermore, Reaugh arranged the loan of paintings from then-contemporary American artists in the East and Midwest for the State Fair of Texas. An vocational naturalist, Reaugh also organized a popular nature study club in Dallas, members of which were young ladies who grew to be influential Dallas civic leaders. Nevertheless, despite his ground-level work to bring art to Dallas, as the Dallas Art Association grew Reaugh was pushed aside by socialites and his contributions forgotten.
Around 1910 and possibly earlier, he began taking students with him on his trips West. Among them were Texas artists Edward G. Eisenlohr, Florence McClung, Lloyd Goff...
Category
1880s Impressionist Pastel Paintings
