Joseph Henry Sharp: A Silent Call
Joseph Henry Sharp’s Vision of the Crow can be seen in his masterpiece Call of the War Chief.
Rippling from a lodgepole like a pennant in a parapet’s breeze, the eagle-feather warbonnet is the “call” in Joseph Henry Sharp’s magnificent oil Call of the War Chief, Crow Reservation, which will be sold at auction as part of The Russell live auction March 20 in Great Falls, Montana. In other cultures, the call might be a cry, the blare of a post horn, or—better—the peal of a chapel bell. In short, a sound. Had it been any one of these, Sharp— who lost his hearing after a falling into a swift river while playing when he was a boy—wouldn’t have heard it.
They say the other senses compensate and sharpen when one sense is diminished or lost, though the history of the arts shows us that this isn’t always the case. After all, Beethoven never heard a measure of his late quartets or his Ninth Symphony—not outside the prodigious invention in his mind.
In Sharp’s case, the loss of his hearing led directly to a life in art. Young Sharp loved the outdoors, lapped up Cooper’s Leathertstocking Tales and was fascinated by a group of Native Americans he had seen passing through on the train on their way to Washington. School not so much. His propensity to doodle only grew with his inability to understand his teachers and he is said to have filled a pad he carried, ostensibly to help him communicate, with drawings. By the age of 14, Sharp was in the big city, Cincinnati, studying art at the Mcmicken School.
Despite his deafness, Sharp had a peripatetic nature, a restless yearning for new places, new sights for his eyes to feast on and for him to paint.
In 1881, Sharp studied in Antwerp, Belgium, then returned to America and went on the first of his journeys to the West, traveling and painting Native Americans in New Mexico, Arizona, California and Wyoming. Sharp went back to Europe in 1885, where he studied in Munich and Paris, and in Italy with Frank Duveneck, and found lifelong inspiration in Goya’s work when he visited Spain. Back in Cincinnati, Sharp married and began to teach. But in 1893 he
went west once again, and made his first visit to Taos. Two years later, Sharp decided to continue his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris. He copied Old Masters like Frans Hals— whose portraiture would greatly influence his own—and, crucially, met Ernest Blumenschein, Bert Geer Phillips and E. I. Couse. Sharp extolled the beauties and virtues of Taos as a place where a true American art might develop and flourish, planting the seed of the first migration of artists, a migration that would lead to the founding of the Taos Society and to the centrality of Taos in American arts and letters.
Cincinnati then, and trips west, to Montana now, where Sharp camped near the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. President Theodore Roosevelt saw and admired the paintings Sharp did there and arranged for a cabin to be built for the artist on the Crow Agency. Sharp would paint hundreds of portraits of survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn as well as
many other likenesses of Native Americans, their lives, livelihoods and ceremonies. When Phoebe Hearst purchased 80 of his paintings, Sharp became financially independent and began to divide his time between Montana and Taos. He settled in Taos in 1912, but from there he would travel to the West Coast and Hawaii, to Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. He would also revisit Montana on numerous occasions. The Gilcrease Museum, which holds more of the artist’s work than any other institution, gave Sharp a career retrospective in 1949. The great man passed away four years later, in 1953.
With the sweep of his life and career in mind, look again at Call of the War Chief. Since the headdress is a visual sign, a silent call, if you will, it would have to have been noticed— and how did it get up there in the first place?
Sharp makes this a game of hide and seek, placing a clump of birches between us and the teepee. The lodgepoles blend in with their tall, slender trunks. After all, what were they, until recently, if not tall, slender trunks? The artist invites us to make an important association here, closely linking the evolution of the design and construction of the teepee with its sources. Nature sustains the Crow, as it sustains all living things, but Sharp’s visual superimposition suggests not only that the Crow understand their world, but that they abide on a harmonious continuum with it. We see the headdress through the all-but-barren branches of the trees, trees that, in this season, are all potential life, what the poet Dylan Thomas called, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
What does it take to earn the title and position of War Chief among the Crow? What does it mean? Traditionally, a member of the Crow had to complete four feats of valor before becoming a war chief: counting coup, or touching a foe without killing him; taking a weapon from an enemy; commanding a triumphant war party; and entering the enemy’s camp at night and stealing a horse. Based on dreams, visions and medicine, war chiefs would divine where there might be horses or game, where and when an enemy would be, when to go to war, and when not to.
I began to feel that I was a little out of my element here, that any spin I put on the meaning of the hanging headdress would be speculative. I’d be lucky to get anywhere near the truth. So I put out my own call. My first email was to Ted Trotta of Trotta-bono, an esteemed dealer of antique American Indian art and an ardent student of Native American material culture
and practice. Trotta replied: “Individuals have vision quests to establish their sacred associations for the benefit of community. The procession to the lodge would in some way be to share and amplify the prayers of the group…the length of the trailer suggests many honors. The headdress is presumably hung in a tree here to announce the lodge’s occupant is of great stature. Every element reveals an autobiographical reference. All who see this most prestigious of accoutrements would recognize the owner belongs to a specific warrior society. Additionally, the headdress is a sacred item, alive, and it is being nourished by being exposed to the powers of the sun, the primary cosmological manitou (spirit) of the upper world.”
Vision quest, a procession to amplify prayers, the living headdress. The mise-en-scene of Call of the War Chief might be a first snow in late fall, but after reading Trotta’s words, I see it as late winter on its way to spring—perhaps because I am looking at images of the painting “in the bleak midwinter,” as the hymn goes. When, and under what circumstances we see a work of art is a largely unmined vein of inquiry. I see those
few yellow leaves on the trees as survivors, tenacious beings hanging on, keeping their echo of beauty through the long cold season. Late fall or early spring, the sun is a sign of a break in the weather, and, perhaps, of an openness to new visions.
I sent out another call, this time to Davison Koenig, executive director and curator of the Couse-sharp Historic Site, who quickly connected me to Alicia Harris, a PHD candidate in Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma. She remembered something in Robert H. Lowie’s landmark American Museum of Natural History study, The Religion of the Crow Indians, and suggested I take a look. Harris reminded me that while Lowie spent a great deal of time among the Crow, interviewing them and recording their practices, it’s best not to get too attached to his somewhat outdated analyses. Still, the book proved an invaluable resource as I investigated the possible source and meaning of the bonnet on the lodgepole.
First, Lowie writes, “As an offering the sweatbathers would tie red cloth to a stick and lean it against the sweatlodge. Little-rump says that the stick with the red cloth, for which an eagle wing might be substituted, was put on top of the lodge and the owner would say, addressing Old-woman’s-grandson, “I have made this sweatlodge because you told me to make it…i give you this red cloth (or eagle wing).” On the red cloth were marked stars or moons and sometimes a circle to represent the sun. The owner sat on the left side for one entering and would sing songs; all who came in were expected to sing.”
Red cloth and an eagle’s wing. Not a bonnet or headdress, but getting closer. Then, reading on in Lowie, not in connection with a sweatlodge this time, but as a prayerful offering to the buffalo: “Buffalo were scared off and the people asked Big-shoulder, one of One-horn’s friends, whether he could get the game nearer to them. He had a bonnet made of a buffalo head with the horns and hung it high upon a pole. Then he told the people that the buffalo were going to come close to the camp.”
Harris added key details: “I noticed that a few of the people in the procession are also carrying what look like drums or maybe bed rolls? The person to the extreme right, and another with his head covered wearing a cream colored blanket both have bundles at their backs. Perhaps they have been called to the tipi to make preparations for a raid or to enter into prayer?”
Harris’ note reinforces Trotta’s and echoes Lowie. Call of the War Chief is a call to prayer after a chief’s vision. The community, united in prayer, would help determine a course of action that the chief’s vision, often a symbolic one, indicates. Sharp knew and painted several Crow War Chiefs, Medicine Crow for one. Did Sharp see this “Call,” or is it something he heard stories of? Hard to say.
Somewhere in Taos a church bell tolled for Joseph Sharp after his funeral; I hope that somewhere along the Little Big Horn a red pennant, or an eagle’s wing, or the feathers of a war bonnet rippled in the wind on a lodgepole in honor and memory of an artist who, though he could not hear, heard the world through the visions of his art.