Harold Bugbee was a landscape, genre, and portrait pinter, as well as an illustrator, muralist, graphic artist and sculptor.
He was a native of Lexington, Massachusetts, and came to Texas in 1912, where he lived on a ranch near Clarendon. He graduated from Clarendon High School, and, attended Clarendon College, as well as, Texas A & M in College Station. He graduated from the Charles Cummings School of Art in Des Moines, Iowa in 1921. He also studied in New York City. He returned to Clarendon around 1922, and, painted, also, with members of the Taos art colony in New Mexico.
Bugbee was an illustrator of books and magazines, and a painter of historical portraits, portraying ranch life. He produced illustrations for J. Evetts Haley's Charles Goodnight, and Cowman and Plainsman and worked with Haley in the production of several other historical works. Bugbee's illustrations often appeared on the covers of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review and in Country Gentleman, Quarter Horse Journal, Progressive Farmer, The Cattleman, and Field and Stream magazines. He taught at the Palo Duro School of Art, and became part-time curator of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon in 1951. Harold Bugbee died in Clarendon, survived by his second wife, Olive Vandruff Bugbee.
