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Granville Bruce (28 June 1903 - 11 October 1989) was best known for his work on natural history dioramas and scenes of historic Texas architectural subjects. Bruce's realistic drawings and painted renderings led the Curator of Art of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum to reflect that he may have been one of the finest draftsmen (in the sense of an artist who excels in drawing) in Texas.

Early Life
Granville was born in Grand Island, Nebraska, the last of eight siblings. His mother died two days after he was born, and Granville lived for several years with his maternal grandmother in a sod house on the Nebraska prairie. He remembered it as a cozy place, well protected from the cold winter wind. The interior was finished out like any other house, complete with wallpaper and comfortable furnishings. When he was five years old, Granville attended one of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Shows, and sat on Buffalo Bill's lap following the performance. He carried a vivid memory of that meeting for the rest of his life, and it inspired his interest in Western art.

Granville's father, Edgar Bruce, remarried and moved the family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, Granville attended Dover School from 1909 through 1917, grades 1 through 8. During a class project in which he made posters for a school drive, his eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Alcutt, recognized his artistic talent and encouraged him to develop it. Granville said, "She liked my artwork so well that she set me up in the front of the class and had me do some drawings there. She also induced me to go to the State Normal School (now Wisconsin State College of Milwaukee) on Saturdays to take some art lessons." In the school of art there "...they set up a lot of mounted animals, squirrels and things like that, and I learned to draw...Later on, I went to the Layton School of Art on a scholarship basis, and that gave me a little broader knowledge of art generally: life class, design class, and advertising art." At the time, the Layton School was one of the best art schools in the nation.

Layton School
Charlotte Partridge, a proponent of progressive ideas in art education, founded the Layton school in 1920. According to art historian Janet Treacy, "The school's purpose was to produce skilled, creative artists, able to earn a living in business, industry or education. Students were allowed to express independent ideas; Partridge did not subscribe to the common practice of copying other artists' work." Partridge believed that students should look to nature for inspiration, a notion that resonated deeply with Bruce. It was a natural extension of his experience drawing animals at the State Normal School. Partridge later played a significant role in developing the basic principles for the New Deal arts programs that helped artists such as Granville Bruce survive the economic disaster of the Great Depression. Another artistic influence encountered by Bruce at Layton was Gerrit V. Sinclair, a "craggy, Lincolnesque figure with an uncoordinated gait, usually tousled hair and rumpled clothes." He had served in the American Ambulance Corps during the first World War and witnessed the horrors of war committed alongside the magnicent churches and art treasures of Europe. Following his return to the Midwest, Sinclair went on to become a successful painter and much-beloved teacher noted for his even temper and cheerful outlook. Janet Treacy writes that, "He painted pictures that were tasteful, comfortable, and appreciated in homes." My interest in art is derived from a keen liking for out-of-doors and the constant and varied effects due to changes in light." Granville Bruce incorporated many of the attitudes and motives of his teachers at the Layton School of Art, Gerrit Sinclair and Charlotte Partridge.

Chicago Art Institute
Bruce continued his art training at the Chicago Art Institute from 1920 to 1924, where he studied with, among others, the noted figure and portrait painter, Wellington J. Reynolds. Reynolds studied at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, as well as the Munich Royal Academy before taking a teaching post at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Reynolds' training was characteristic of American-born artists of his generation, when a successful career in art required study abroad, usually in France or Germany. As American art schools proliferated and improved, however, upcoming artists-in-training were able to gain a quality education closer to home. This suited Granville Bruce, who was able to remain focused on his academic preparation.

Travel to Texas
A group of artists from Taos, New Mexico brought their work to Milwaukee for a show that had a profound effect on the young Granville Bruce. Inspired by what he saw, the artist decided to take a trip. He planned to travel south during the winter, then west to San Antonio, New Mexico, Arizona and California, returning home the following spring or summer. In 1923, he stuffed his belongings into a Boy Scout pack and set out on his grand tour of the American West. A limited budget forced him to resort to hitchhiking and hopping aboard freight trains to conserve resources. Bruce arrived in Galveston, Texas, on New Year's Eve. "Bells were ringing in 1924," he remembers. "I was standing outside the Galvez Hotel looking in, that Boy Scout sack on my back, watching the people dance and having a hilarious time. All that music and things kinda stirred me up."

In order to make ends meet, Bruce took a job heating soldering irons for a tinsmith building metal roofs. Weather interfered with that job, so he hired on as a laborer and shoveled sand to build the Galveston sea wall, but could not compete with the burly men inured to hard physical work outdoors. With three dollars in his pocket, Bruce hitched a ride to San Antonio.

San Antonio
Bruce arrived in San Antonio late in the evening, with almost no money on him. A police officer volunteered a safe place to sleep for the night, on a bench in the local police station. Following the night as a guest of the San Antonio Police Department, Bruce found an inexpensive tourist court near Brackenridge Park, pitched his Boy Scout pup tent, and set off to find something to draw. He bought a box of children’s crayons and one sheet of Strathmore charcoal paper. Each cost a precious nickel. He picked up a scrap piece of lumber, laid newspaper on top to make a serviceable drawing board, and began sketching the Mexican village near Brackenridge Park. Bruce describes what happened next. "A [man] came up behind me and asked, ‘Are you an artist?’ I looked up at a tall gentleman with a big western hat.  He had a Windsor tie on, and boots—tall boots."

Hugo D. Pohl
The tall gentleman in the tall boots was the artist Hugo David Pohl. Like Bruce, he was on a quest for inspiration. He had been all the way to California, and even though he was impressed by its Spanish missions, he preferred those of San Antonio and returned to put down roots there. Pohl liked the earnest, well mannered young man he met in the park that day and soon became Bruces’ teacher, mentor, and friend. Together, they approached San Antonio park superintendent Ray Lambert and asked to build a combination home and studio in the middle of the Brackenridge Park Zoo (later, the San Antonio Zoo). When permission was granted, they tore down some abandoned shacks and used the lumber to build what would be their home for the next six years. Their self-built studio and home was located across from the zoo's ostrich pens, one block over from the lion and tiger cages. They constructed living quarters with a stained glass window, studio space with a skylight, a storage room, and a garage. Escaped prairie dogs were frequent visitors and the big cats roared until they became commonplace neighbors. Zoo-goers could view the artists’ latest paintings in a showcase built into the front of the house.

Southwest Travels
In the summer of 1927, Granville Bruce and Hugo Pohl decided to take a trip to Taos, New Mexico. They outfitted Pohl’s Ford Roadster as a camping vehicle and called it their "Artist’s Caravan." "I think it was really a forerunner of the camper as we know it today." Bruce recalls. "This "studio" was composed of a library, a place to sleep, a place to eat, and down under the floorboards a place to bathe, you know, like a footbath. When we had dirty clothes to wash, we sometimes filled that little tub with water and soap, put our clothes in, shut the lid, and drove on.  When we got to the next stopping place, the clothes were clean."

Bruce and Pohl left San Antonio on August 1, 1927. As they drove through Texas, their route took them to Uvalde, Langtry, Van Horn, and El Paso. From there they headed into New Mexico, heading north to Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, arriving in Taos on August 9. They secured a room in Hiker’s Camp, an old adobe ranch house, and then took a drive around town to see what it had to offer. Bruce was disappointed to find that many of the Indians had cut their hair short and taken up "white man’s clothes." He wrote in his journal that something about the people "goes deep to the heart. No matter how they dress, there is something that their features tell you, and strikes deep within you." On this trip, Bruce found several subjects for study sketches; some of those studies later became the basis of oil paintings. Bruce described his time in Taos Pueblo like "being in a land of dreams." A partial list of studies created on this trip includes Taos Indian Village: Creekside setting in Taos, New Mexico, Old Adobe House Near Santa Fe, Deserted Stagecoach Station, and Old Water Mill. All those inspired completed oil paintings over a period of years.

Launching a Career
Back in San Antonio, Bruce continued to study with Hugo Pohl. In 1927, they collaborated on a tinted charcoal drawing of the chapel doors of Mission San José. Granville Bruce did the drawing, and Pohl did the tinting and signed the piece. Bruce made a charcoal drawing of his mentor in 1928 and also produced a charcoal sketch and oil painting entitled The Shadowed Trail, of a scene in the back Brackenridge Park of a trail leading to the rear of Incarnate Word College.

Eleanor Onderdonk, daughter of Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, known as the "Dean of Texas Artists," sponsored Bruce's first one-artist show at the Witte Museum in the mid-1920s. With that encouragement, Bruce went on to create at least 40 sketches of historical places during his years in San Antonio.

Bruce's career received a boost in 1926-1927 when he got a job illustrating the University of Texas annual, The Cactus. That year's theme was Prominent Texans. Bruce explained with a chuckle, "You know, like Peg Leg Williamson." He continued, "Well, that went over pretty good — so I thought I'd venture into illustrating."

In 1930, Bruce met and married Ula Lee Mead, an art student of his partner, Hugo Pohl, and the sister of fellow artist Ben Carlton Mead. The couple moved to Dallas in 1931 when Bruce received an assignment to illustrate a story, "Maria Santissima," for Holland's Magazine, a regional women's magazine headquartered there, and that one assignment was followed by more for Holland's as well as Progressive Farmer and other popular magazines. In 1933, Bruce joined the staff of John Malone, where he remained for eight years, illustrating ads for leading clients. At about the same time, Bruce illustrated several books on Western history, including J. Wright Mooar's Buffalo Days and Westmoreland Gray's Aces Back to Back. In 1932, Bruce worked under President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) to create murals for Sunset High school in Dallas and the high school in Corsicana, Texas. Meanwhile, he continued to produce easel painting, exhibiting at the Dallas Allied Arts in 1932 and the State Fair of Texas in 1934. Under the same PWAP, he painted a 68x12 1/2-foot mural for the Texas State Fish and Game Commission in the John H. Reagan Building in Austin. Some of his other works include a series of oils, entitled "Six Missions of Texas," presented to the Texas State Library by Mr. and Mrs. J. B. Godfrey, and 120 pencil portraits of prominent Texans for the Texas edition of "Men of Achievement."

Dallas Museum of Natural History
During the excitement surrounding the Texas Centennial, Bruce landed his dream assignment, the kind of work he had admired as a boy. He was tapped to paint exhibits for the opening of the new Museum of Natural History in Fair Park in Dallas before the opening of the museum in 1936. By the time the opening day arrived, he had completed several large backdrops for natural habitat groups of birds and other animals. He was one of five artists who created the diorama backdrops in the museum. This Texas Centennial assignment launched a relationship with the museum that would be sustained for the rest of his life. The work was complex. Each new diorama exhibiting the natural habitat of Texas wildlife required a field trip as part of a team to visit the area to be portrayed. On location, Bruce would sketch and paint, capturing the reality as well as the spirit of the place on the planet that would be seen by visitors to the museum. The artwork and photographs done on location were translated into the full-scale, 10- by 11-foot background canvas back at the museum, an endeavor that could take weeks or months to complete.

Granville Bruce received much recognition for his work with the Dallas Museum of Natural History. In 1982, after a 47 year collaboration with the Museum, it hosted a major retrospective of several of his oil paintings, many of which were inspired by his work on diorama background art for the Museum. His exhibition included several paintings of wildlife and landscapes of Texas, many of them full realizations of sketches he made on field trips for the Museum. Of special note were additional works from his "Texas Missions" series. As a special attraction, 29 dioramas with Bruce's background paintings were specially marked for viewers during the exhibition.

Later Years
Following his retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, Granville continued to be productive, participating in "The American Invitational Watercolor Show" at the Hummingbird Gallery in Tucson, AZ and contributing to the Historic Irving Neighborhood Association.

In later years, Bruce's wife, Ula Lee, gradually succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease. Her worsening condition mandated that she and Granville move from their long-time home in Irving, and in 1985, they moved into their eldest daughter's home in Sanger, Texas, north of Irving. There Bruce remained until his death on October 11, 1989.

Posthumous Recognition
A major exhibition of Bruce's works was mounted in 2005 at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas. About 80 of his works were on display from the end of July through October at the museum, along with several photographs of him at different stages of his career. Also in 2005, the publication of Buffalo Days: Stories from J. Wright Mooar as told to James Winford Hunt took place. Significantly, this book, a compilation of stories originally published in Holland′s magazine, contains all the illustrations that Granville Bruce created for the series in Holland's.