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Joseph Henry Sharp
1859–1953
BirthplaceBridgeport, Ohio, United States of America
Death placePasadena, California, United States of America
BiographyJoseph Henry Sharp devoted his career to painting the landscape and the Native American inhabitants of what would become the western United States. Born in Bridgeport, Ohio, Sharp was encouraged by his mother to express himself through art. His interest in his chosen subject was largely stimulated by reading American author James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, a series of historical novels featuring encounters between settlers and Native Americans. A childhood accident left Sharp deaf for life at the age of twelve, and he left school to work in a nail factory and copper shop to help support his large family. However, two years later, with his mother’s support, Sharp was allowed to enroll in Cincinnati’s McMicken School of Design.
In the 1880s, based in Cincinnati, Sharp made three long trips to Europe for further study in Antwerp, Belgium; Munich, Germany; and Paris. He also journeyed west, on the advice of his friend and mentor, western painter Henry Farny (1847–1916). Visiting New Mexico, California, and the Pacific Northwest in 1883, he studied and sketched the various tribes he encountered and collected artifacts in an effort to preserve what was widely regarded as a vanishing way of life. Sharp taught at the Cincinnati Art Academy while working during summers in Taos, New Mexico. The first artist to work regularly in Taos painting Native American subjects, he encouraged other artists to do so, notably painters Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874–1960) and Bert Phillips (1868–1956), whom he met in Paris in the mid-1890s. Sharp, meanwhile, had begun working regularly on the Crow reservation in Montana, capturing in his portraits and photographs the individual participants in the famous Battle of Little Big Horn between Plains Indians and American military forces in 1876.
After the turn of the century, Sharp’s work attracted a number of important patrons, notably Phoebe Hearst (mother of publisher William Randolph Hearst); Joseph G. Butler of Youngstown, Ohio; and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Beginning in the late 1890s, Sharp divided his time between Taos, Montana, and California. After his first wife’s death, in 1913, however, he became a permanent resident of Taos. Two years later, he helped found the Taos Society of Artists, a group of academically trained painters who celebrated southwestern life and landscape in their naturalistic, highly popular works. Sharp, the oldest member, was considered the spiritual father of the group. He was also financially one of its most successful. Even during the Great Depression and late in his life, when his traditional approach to painting was outmoded, his works were consistently popular. Sensitive, well-constructed, and carefully researched, Sharp’s Indian paintings were appreciated by such patrons as Oklahoma oilman Thomas Gilcrease, founder of the Gilcrease Museum, for their ethnographic accuracy as well as their aesthetic quality, and his extensive collection of Indian artifacts, also acquired by Gilcrease, was considered the finest ever amassed by an individual collector.
In the 1880s, based in Cincinnati, Sharp made three long trips to Europe for further study in Antwerp, Belgium; Munich, Germany; and Paris. He also journeyed west, on the advice of his friend and mentor, western painter Henry Farny (1847–1916). Visiting New Mexico, California, and the Pacific Northwest in 1883, he studied and sketched the various tribes he encountered and collected artifacts in an effort to preserve what was widely regarded as a vanishing way of life. Sharp taught at the Cincinnati Art Academy while working during summers in Taos, New Mexico. The first artist to work regularly in Taos painting Native American subjects, he encouraged other artists to do so, notably painters Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874–1960) and Bert Phillips (1868–1956), whom he met in Paris in the mid-1890s. Sharp, meanwhile, had begun working regularly on the Crow reservation in Montana, capturing in his portraits and photographs the individual participants in the famous Battle of Little Big Horn between Plains Indians and American military forces in 1876.
After the turn of the century, Sharp’s work attracted a number of important patrons, notably Phoebe Hearst (mother of publisher William Randolph Hearst); Joseph G. Butler of Youngstown, Ohio; and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Beginning in the late 1890s, Sharp divided his time between Taos, Montana, and California. After his first wife’s death, in 1913, however, he became a permanent resident of Taos. Two years later, he helped found the Taos Society of Artists, a group of academically trained painters who celebrated southwestern life and landscape in their naturalistic, highly popular works. Sharp, the oldest member, was considered the spiritual father of the group. He was also financially one of its most successful. Even during the Great Depression and late in his life, when his traditional approach to painting was outmoded, his works were consistently popular. Sensitive, well-constructed, and carefully researched, Sharp’s Indian paintings were appreciated by such patrons as Oklahoma oilman Thomas Gilcrease, founder of the Gilcrease Museum, for their ethnographic accuracy as well as their aesthetic quality, and his extensive collection of Indian artifacts, also acquired by Gilcrease, was considered the finest ever amassed by an individual collector.