Joseph Henry Sharp’s Montana
Joseph Henry Sharp’s years at the Crow Agency in Montana is the subject of a new exhibition at the Couse-sharp studio in Taos.
Taos, NM
“My heart was always warm in Montana,” Joseph Henry Sharp, to Samuel Guil Reynolds, Indian Agent, Crow Agency, Montana
While most people trace the founding of the Taos Society of Artists back to the legend of the broken wagon wheel, it actually came into existence much earlier, more than a decade earlier to be precise, when Joseph Henry Sharp first headed West— first to Santa Fe, then to Taos and then eventually to Montana, fueled by a passion to paint the
chiefs of the Great Plains who survived the Battle of Little Big Horn. Sharp first traveled to Santa Fe in 1883 and then to Taos in 1893 and it was Sharp, who while studying at the Academie Julian in 1894, whispered to his fellow students Ernest Bluemenschein and Bert Phillips about the beauty located around the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Northern New Mexico.
This summer, the Couse-sharp Historic Site has organized Joseph Henry Sharp’s Montana, an exhibition of paintings and photographs from Sharp’s time in Montana, held directly in the studio he used for almost 40 years. According Davison Koenig, the site’s executive director and curator, the works of art are on loan from private collectors and museums, some of which are being publicly exhibited for the first time.
On Saturday, June 15, at 10 a.m., the morning after the bi-annual Couse Foundation gala, Dr. Marie Watkins will give a lecture titled “So me for the North and snow!” at the Harwood Museum. The lecture will discuss Sharp’s Montana years and the work completed during this time.
“Sharp famously said that Taos can wait because the Pueblo people had been able to hold on to their culture,” says Koenig. “However, the Plains culture, 20 years after the Battle of Little Big Horn, saw cultural lifeways decimated, absorbed and driven out. And Sharp saw the need to act to preserve all of this. He saw his role not merely as an artist. In effect, his work was ethnography and he wanted to accurately record the beauty of the people as well as the hardships they faced.”
At the time, Sharp was teaching at the Cincinnati Art Academy and would travel West in the summers as soon as the halls emptied and the students returned home. Sharp first traveled to Montana in 1899 and then came back every summer from 1902 to 1908. Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst was a fan and patron of Sharp during these Montana years. She saw his paintings in 1902 at the Pan-american Exposition in Buffalo and commissioned Sharp to do 80 portraits of Native Americans. Sharp used this money to buy a cabin at the Crow agency and then later, in 1909, to buy an abandoned Penitente chapel in Taos for use as a studio.
Hearst’s entire collection of 155 Sharp paintings was eventually donated to the University of California, Berkeley. “What strikes me most about Sharp’s Montana work, especially with his portraits, is the humanity of the people he painted,” says Watkins. “There is a crispness to those works that comes from an understanding of the people and how he portrayed their humanity. These are famous warriors, but he also depicted them as distinct individuals.”