Legend in His Time

This excerpt from a new book on Robert Lougheed spotlights the painter's transition from illustrator to master western artist

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MOST MEN confront their own mortality for the first time around the age of fifty with the realization that, in all likelihood, more than half of their life is behind them. Bob Lougheed turned fifty in May, 1960. All things considered, he had every reason to be content with the hand that destiny had dealt him. [His wife] Cordy was part of it, of course, and the happiness of having a home and someone to share it with. Bob knew now that life involved more than only art. Cordy's companionship filled in the empty space that existed apart from the painting.

Bob valued his friends too, and especially John Clymer. By the 1960s, Bob and John were both acknowledged as among the elite of their generation of illustrators. John was only a couple of years older than Bob, and they had shared the same sort of struggles starting out and breaking into the business. Now they talked about the "old days," as middle-aged men do, and of how it would be, someday, when the time was right, to just leave it all behind for somewhere else and the freedom to paint for their own pleasure as the muse might move them. There was a lot of talk in the 1960s about "karma," and if there was really anything to it, Bob had the best kind.

In 1960, Bob was commissioned by National Geographic magazine to produce a series of thirteen paintings depicting various breeds of horses in America. This was a prestigious assignment, and Bob embraced it with enthusiasm. There was nothing he enjoyed painting more than horses. Included among the thirteen breeds involved in the assignment was the American Quarter Horse. National Geographic arranged for Bob to visit the historic Bell Ranch in northeastern New Mexico which was known for breeding outstanding examples of the Quarter Horse for its cowboys to ride.

The Bell Ranch encompassed 300,000 acres out of the original 700,000 acre Montoya land grant that traced back to Spanish colonial times in New Mexico. The ranch was named for a prominent bell-shaped butte that had served as a landmark since the days of conquistadors who had come in search of a fabled place called Cibola and its seven golden cities.

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Bob was staggered by the sheer size of the ranch and the vastness of space and of sky. Mule deer and antelope grazed alongside herds of white-faced Hereford cattle at the mid and lower elevations on the ranch. There were said to be mountain lions farther up in the rugged high country, where eagles built their nests in the steep, rocky crags. And then there were the horses, lots and lots of horses, ranch hand remudas and brood mare bands in a rainbow array of colors - more horses than Bob had ever seen before, or even imagined, in one place at one time.

Cattle ranching in the west had changed hardly at all in almost one hundred years, and Bob might have believed he had wandered into another world and another time. His artistic instincts were stirred at the sight of a panorama of cattle and horses and men moving in a cloak of dust across a landscape uncluttered by any sign of modern civilization. It all seemed so different from the way western novels and movies had said it was. Bob knew he was seeing something special, something grand and on a scale that could not be translated into art in the ordinary manner. He came away from the Bell Ranch in the fall of 1960 with much more than the material for a horse picture for National Geographic. The way Bob saw it, "The west is too big to be confi
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