Joseph Henry Sharp (Amer., 1859-1953), "Grasshopper - Cheyenne", etching, signed in the plate, title and edition number written in pencil in the margin, ed. 19/227

sight: 8.5 x 6.5 in., frame: 21 x 18.5 in.

Provenance: Property from a home in Laredo, Texas

Joseph Sharp received his early art training at the McMicken School and Cincinnati Academy of Art, later studying in Antwerp with Charles Verlat, at the Munich Academy with Karl von Marr, and at the Académie Julian in Paris; he also traveled with Frank Duveneck through Spain and Italy. His formative relationships included fellow Cincinnati artist Henry Farny, who encouraged his interest in Native American cultures, and Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips, whom he met in Paris and who later joined him in Taos. A pioneering painter of the American West and a founder of the Taos art community, Sharp became renowned for meticulously observed portraits and genre scenes of Native Americans, valued for their detailed accuracy, as well as richly colored Western and floral landscapes. He first visited Taos in 1893, later settling there permanently, and traveled extensively throughout the West to document Native cultures, including painting approximately 200 portraits of Plains Indians associated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn at the invitation of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had a studio built for him at the battlefield site. His sketches were published in Harper’s Weekly, and beginning in 1915 he held a series of annual Christmas exhibitions in Cincinnati; many of his Native American paintings are now held by the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.