Taos Canyon

Joseph Henry Sharp’s Taos Canyon is a view of the picturesque scenery along the curving canyon road that crosses the Taos Pueblo Indian Reservation between Taos and Angel Fire, New Mexico, along the course of the Rio Fernando de Taos, a mountain stream. Gathered in conversation on the road are three horsemen dressed in the bright colors favored by the area’s Native American inhabitants. The diagonals of the road and stream lead the eye toward a descending ridge, purple-blue in the distance under fair-weather clouds. The autumnal setting, with its rich colors, highlights the region’s variety of flora, which ranges from Piñon-juniper to Ponderosa Pine, fir, and spruce.

In the 1890s, Sharp became the first artist to work regularly in Taos painting its native inhabitants, and he encouraged other artists to join him. By 1915, the year Sharp and six other artists founded the Taos Society of Artists, the New Mexican town was firmly established as an art colony. It attracted both conservative, academically trained artists such as Sharp and those sympathetic to newer artistic ideas. All were inspired by the life and culture of the area’s Native American and Spanish inhabitants as well as by New Mexico’s stark scenery, clear skies, and brilliant light and color. For Sharp and many of his contemporaries, Taos was the setting for and subject of a truly American art, one untainted by European influence. The red, white, and blue of the clothing worn by the horsemen in Taos Canyon hint at the rich associations between the western landscape and a resurgent nationalism heightened by the outbreak overseas of the first World War.

Fascinated with America’s native inhabitants since boyhood, Sharp devoted his long career to painting them in an effort to preserve what was widely lamented as a vanishing way of life. Just as he portrayed Indians as practitioners of a traditional culture, he presented Western scenery in an idealized state of premodern purity. As demonstrated in Taos Canyon, Sharp’s approach to painting, using a naturalistic style grounded on his academic training in Europe, suited his conservative agenda. The deep recession into space, nearly square horizontal format, broken brushwork, and solidly realized natural forms in this work all are hallmarks of the conservative but still-popular style that persisted among many academically trained American artists well into the twentieth century. Taos Canyon may well have been among the many canvases Sharp exhibited in the highly popular traveling exhibitions circulated by the Taos Society before it disbanded in 1928.

America the Beautiful: Landscapes from Home, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, October 16, 2001–January 13, 2002.

A Place on the Avenue: Terra Museum of American Art Celebrates 15 Years in Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, November 16, 2002–February 16, 2003.

Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, August–September 2003.

Highlights from the Collection of the Terra Foundation for the Arts, Union League Club of Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Union League Club of Chicago, Illinois, July 20–October 31, 2004.