Unearthing a New Mother Lode

Sporting Classics | July/August 2024

By Todd Wilkinson

A trove of works from the estate of painter Robert Lougheed is giving new generations fresh appreciation for his sporting art.

How would you rate your level of knowledge about some of the greatest sporting artists of the past century?

Just for fun, try this test. Mention the name Robert Elmer Lougheed and, in some older social circles, the reference immediately summons heartfelt visions of major oil paintings hanging in prominent museums or works considered essential additions to any reputable private Western art collection.

Indeed, Lougheed (1910-1982) is celebrated as a master painter of horses and as a “cowboy artist” though he never dwelled on a ranch, ran cattle or would be mistaken for a salty wrangler on the fictional TV shows “Gunsmoke” or “Yellowstone.”

The Canadian-American did command mystique for designing Mobile Oil’s famous flying red horse icon seen at service stations across the country and he was enlisted by the U.S. Postal Service to create a six-cent stamp featuring a bison as part of the agency’s Wildlife Conservation Series.

“Lone Survivor and Leon Covington”
12"×16" | Oil

Yet name drop “Lougheed” today in the company of friends age 50 or younger and seldom will he, posthumously, ring a bell. This lack of recognition—and reverence—may be about to change thanks to an uncirculated trove of Lougheeds now rising into public awareness for the first time ever.

For Bill and Maggie Rey, the sheer volume of imagery is, in their words, “breathtakingly astounding.” Oil paintings, as fine as some well-known Lougheeds that have come up for auction or earned critical praise at top shows 60 years ago, headline the treasures. They’re within a larger corpus that, for decades, never left the adobe home and studio where Lougheed lived with his late wife, Cordy, in the artist enclave of Tesuque just outside Santa Fe. According to the Reys, owners of Claggett/Rey Gallery in the Vail Valley of Colorado—which acquired the mother lode of Lougheed art and artifacts—the cache also includes hundreds of colorful field studies portraying wildlife, pastoral landscapes and figurative pieces the artist made while painting on location in North America and Europe across a span of 40 years.

“We, of course, were well aware of Lougheed’s reputation and the influence he had on other artists,” Bill Rey says. “But until we began collaborating with Cordy in the last years of her life to assemble the full inventory of what was in front of us, we had no idea of the diversity of work that basically had never seen the light of day beyond his own studio. Situations like this rarely arise in the art world.”

“Pointer on a Covey of Birds”
8"×10" | Oil

For collectors of sporting art interested in wildlife, hunting and fishing scenes, the recently uncovered Lougheeds make a strong case for him being counted among the finest of the genre, Rey suggests. They include portrayals of big game animals, depictions of an indigenous fishing camp at Kotzebue in the far arctic north of Alaska, traditional quail, dove and fox hunting scenes, portraits of Canadian Mounties and rural folk cutting ice slabs out of lakes in the artist’s native Ontario and renderings of the Lougheeds’ beloved American Southwest.

Further, there are easel paintings Lougheed produced as an illustrator for prominent U.S. magazines such as Sports Afield, National Geographic and Reader’s Digest. Jaw droppingly, he adds, there literally are stacks of plein air sketches, which speak to Lougheed’s relentless devotion to painting on location outdoors while fully immersed in natural shifting light and moody conditions.

A century ago, neither Lougheed himself nor those who knew him could have predicted the arc his career would take. A farm kid hailing from the small town of Massie, Ontario, hard along the shore of Georgian Bay in Lake Huron, Lougheed did not, at least at first, head west to achieve fame.

His late teens and early twenties, in the years leading to World War II, were searching years. Lougheed, who discovered he had talent to draw early, took classes at the Ontario College of Art and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Montreal. Then, after landing a newspaper illustrator job in Toronto, he met a young American working for Maclean’s magazine. His new friend was John Clymer, another illustrator. Seeing Lougheed’s work, Clymer encouraged him to enroll in the Art Students League in New York City. Away he went and a short while later Clymer joined him.

“November Hunt”
30"×36" | Oil

The League was considered one of the most reputable training grounds for emerging artists at that time in America. The school, which offered classical training and exposed painters and sculptors to tutelage from a distinguished cadre of instructors, was a pipeline for graduates finding work with ad agencies, publishing houses and magazines whose circulations reached millions every month.

Among the League’s prominent alumni who left their mark in easel painting and sculpture were Winslow Homer, Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton and mavericks such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

Lougheed fell under the wing of Frank Vincent DuMond, who also taught O’Keeffe, Rockwell, sporting artist Ogden Pleissner, Donald Teague, Ken Riley and others. A bonus for Lougheed is that DuMond loved to hunt and fish and often he invited his students to join him on excursions in New England and the maritime provinces of Canada. A favorite destination was Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

“The atmospheric, mountainous vistas of the Cape reinforced DuMond’s philosophy of art and instruction and his belief that painting nature successfully required a personal encounter between the artist and the wilderness,” observed the noted art historian B. Byron Price in his 1990 book Lougheed: A Painter’s Painter. “Great art, DuMond maintained, resulted from the balance between the heart of the artist and the power of his natural surroundings.”

Lougheed, after leaving the League, became a member of what art historians call the “Connecticut Art Mafia,” a group of illustrators, including John Clymer, who settled in Westport just outside of New York City and won prestigious assignments from magazines and ad agencies. When models were needed as reference, to quickly turn around assignments handed them on tight deadlines, Lougheed, Clymer and their close illustrator friend Tom Lovell would mirthfully assist each other. They’d don costumes and pose, be in the attire of mountain men, explorers, hunters or other characters. Clymer, it should be noted, was second only to Norman Rockwell in the number of covers he painted for The Saturday Evening Post.

Rey notes the trio brought a competitive spirit to everything they did. Earlier in his life Lougheed dreamed of becoming a professional hockey player but an illness and his long convalescence with a sketchpad in his hands sent him down a different path.

“Lougheed was athletic and known for being an intense badminton player,” Rey says. “He became champion several years running in a league with high- powered businesspeople and some of the most famous illustrators in the world.” 

Despite their status as artists, Lougheed and colleagues were down to earth, unpretentious. During the 1950s and 1960s, as illustrators were being rendered obsolete by photography and television advertising, many artists headed west, landing in Santa Fe and Taos, Tucson and California.

Lovell settled near the Lougheeds in Santa Fe and Clymer relocated to Teton Village in Jackson Hole. Eight years after Lougheed passed in 1982, Lovell wrote this tribute which appeared in Price’s biography. “Bob Lougheed was a quiet, forceful man, dedicated to painting. Not talkative, yet he held strong opinions and expressed himself well. Relative to outdoor painting, he said that ‘the best information is always in front of you’ and he lived by this.” Interestingly, two years later, Lovell was awarded the Robert Lougheed Memorial Award at the annual Prix de West Invitational Art competition sponsored by the National Academy of Western Artists (NAWA) and held at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City.

The Lougheed Award is a coveted honor recognizing the artist who delivers the strongest four paintings to the Prix de West show and celebrates the high consistency of Lougheed’s work. Canadian-born Lougheed, New York City-bred Lovell and Washington State timber town product Clymer had been charter members of NAWA and it remains the most prestigious force in all Western art. Lovell and Lougheed also won numerous awards from the Cowboy Artists of America.

Part of an ethic Lougheed carried forth from DuMond was being generous with his time and over the years several talented young painters studied with him, whether in New Mexico or at the Okanagan Game Farm in British Columbia. There he co-taught plein air techniques with the Canadian naturalistic painter Clarence Tillenius. Often, there were guest artists who joined Lougheed, including Lovell and Clymer.

“Grizzly Studies”
12"×16" | Oil

During his career, Lougheed was enlisted to paint the national field trial champion dog, an assignment featuring different horse breeds for National Geographic magazine and across a two decade span he spent couple of weeks every year painting autumn scenes at the Bell Ranch in New Mexico. The Art Students League and the rigors of toiling as an illustrator transformed him into a painter who could tackle almost any subject. “The only thing we don’t see in his portfolio is nudes,” Rey says, adding levity. “That was because Bob had such high moral standards and was embarrassed about the idea of painting nude women. He felt far more comfortable painting animals.”

Rey points to a couple of fox hunt scenes Lougheed created and he says they exude the kind of refined brilliance as one finds in the work of Sir Alfred Munnings, regarded as one of the finest horse painters in England. It is one of the works Cordy Lougheed never wanted to part with and viewed it every day until she died—along with a few dozen other paintings that adorned their home. She could feel the spirt of her husband in the works. “Cordy loved to travel with Bob. Together they encountered many of the scenes he painted and she had an amazing artistic eye, which he recognized and welcomed receiving her critiques,” Rey says. “By reputation, he could be a stoic, but he opened up to her.

“The late grocery store tycoon Eddie Basha, Jr., who was one of the largest private collectors of Lougheed and his peers Lovell and Clymer, told me nearly 25 years ago that he believed they served an important role in 20th century Western art. He was a conduit between several different genres and was at the forefront of a movement among younger artists to paint from life outdoors. At a time when urban adherents of post-modernism and abstract expressionism were arguing that realism—including subjects like wildlife and landscapes were out of vogue, Lougheed and his contemporaries pushed back. They argued there is nothing more inspiring to viewers than the beauty of nature. They also had a soft spot in their hearts for working people who made their living on the land.”

A great book to have on the shelf is Follow the Sun: Robert Lougheed by Don Hedgpeth. The title takes its name from Lougheeds penchant for painting outdoors all day and literally changing his perspective of the landscape in accordance with the movement of the sun across the sky. I once interviewed Lougheed student Wayne Wolfe who said the master believed there were an infinite number of painting options, revealed each day, for the person who engages an outdoor subject and sees it as an ever-changing panorama. In his book, Hedgpeth wrote that “the world owes a debt of gratitude to Robert Lougheed.” Notably, the 2010 book provides a sneak preview of many of the Lougheeds that Claggett/Rey Gallery now has for sale.