Texas Bluebonnet Painters is an educational venture that will increase awareness of the quality and variety of artists who were active painting the native wildflowers of Texas in the years before and after World War II. Early Texas art is a subject that was ignored for far too long and is only now receiving the attention it deserves.

Most of the biographies on these Texas artists that are available online are short and often cribbed from someone else’s website and then re-edited. Instead of propagating poorly researched or perhaps even incorrect information, what we have done here is to post more thorough and better-researched biographies of each artist (in some cases these may be the most complete biography available on the artist) as well as an analysis of his paintings and lifetime of artistic production. We have an extensive art research library to rely on as well as an archive of artist’s letters, manuscripts, and historic art periodicals and have augmented these sources with research from historic archives.

I first became interested in Early Texas art through researching and selling the paintings of Robert W. Wood, whom my father began working with in the late 1950s. With art history, studying or researching one painter invariably leads to another and one soon learns they are usually part of a movement of like-minded painters. Art is seldom the solitary activity that the layperson often thinks it is. My interest in Texas art deepened when my father had a gallery in Houston’s historic Shamrock Hilton in the 1970s. In the 1980s, I used to make a trip to the Texas Hill Country each spring, where I saw the fields of wild Bluebonnets around Austin, Bourne and San Antonio. By then of course, the Blue Lupin were almost inescapable as they had been seeded into the traffic margins after Ladybird Johnson had returned home from Washington D.C.

If you have further biographical information on any of these artists that you would like to share, please feel free to send us an e-mail. Or, if you have a painting by one of these artists that you would like to share or need an assessment of, please feel free to send an e-mail with the size and history of the painting you have as well as a digital image of the front and back of the work in question.

Jeffrey Morseburg