Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man by Michael R. Grauer (review)

Collectors, gallery owners, museum professionals, art historians, and critics interested in early Texas art will welcome this new volume. The art of Frank Reaugh (pronounced "Ray") is currently enjoying renewed appreciation by the early Texas art community after decades of semi-neglect. Michael R. Grauer, who is art curator at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, oversees the largest collection of Reaugh'sworkinthe state. This monograph rests on a rich base of public and private archival sources as well as published material. The author's goal is to provide the first critical look at the life and career of a man who has been previously presented as an eccentric and "to let Mr. Reaugh, and the truth about him, speak for themselves" (p. 3).

Charles Franklin Reaugh was born in 1860 in Illinois and moved to Texas with his parents at age fifteen. They lived first in Terrell before Reaugh settled in Oak Cliff, soon to be incorporated into the city of Dallas. He remained a resident of the city for the rest of his life (he died in 1945). However, as an artist, the cotton culture and landscapes of East Texas did not inspire him. He devoted his long career to depicting the land of West Texas and its cattle culture. Reaugh's art career flourished in the period in which open-range grazing still dominated the cattle industry in the West. His prolific output documented that era even as it was vanishing.

Grauer begins his study with a brief overview of art in Texas up to Reaugh's formative years. Next comes a long chapter discussing the numerous influences on Reaugh's art, from the Hudson River School to the French Impressionists. After a sojourn studying in France and Holland, Reaugh embraced Impressionism and remained an Impressionist to the end of his life.

Reaugh's career peaked in the period from 1890 to 1915 when Impressionism dominated the American art scene. He exhibited regularly with other leading American Impressionists and acquired a regional reputation in the West and Midwest. He had similar status to the better-remembered Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell as an artist of the vanishing West. Grauer says that Reaugh should also be compared to Texas historical painters William Henry Huddle and Henry Arthur McArdle because he was witness to the vanishing open range.

Grauer highlights Reaugh's accomplishments as a teacher and art promoter to make the case for his importance in Texas. Reaugh should be lauded for his impact as a teacher, both for the number of Texas artists who were his students and for his innovations. He took women students seriously and took student groups on camping trips to the West to inspire their landscape work. He made his own pastels, paper, and frames to facilitate open-air sketching. The artist used his contacts to organize traveling shows of nationally and regionally known artists and bring them to Dallas. He lobbied for a public art gallery and helped found the Dallas Art Association and its collection in 1903.

In the 1920s the rise of Regionalism began to render Impressionism unfashionable. As he grew older, Reaugh found himself increasingly marginalized from the art scene in Dallas by a younger generation of Regionalists, some of them his former students. His progressive alienation culminated in his exclusion from the art show at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, the most important exhibition of Texas artists' work to date. It was a fate undeserved by so important an early leader in the growth of the visual arts in Texas.