Western Paintings and Sculpture including Contemporary Native American Art Session I

Provenance:

Shannon’s Fine Art, Auctioneers, Milford, Connecticut, 2004

Born in Ohio in 1859, a swimming accident when he was a boy left young Joseph Henry Sharp deaf. Though Henry seems to have loved art, apocryphal tales suggest that his interest arose out of his need to doodle at school to communicate. But there were other enthralling distractions in his life, namely, nature, the outdoors and Native Americans. By the age of 14, Sharp was already was studying art in Cincinnati. He would further his education in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain before returning home with an ambition to paint Native Americans in the West. Sharp visited Taos in 1893 but made his name painting hundreds of portraits, landscapes, and scenes of daily life and celebrations while living among the Crow in a cabin and studio near the Little Big Horn in Montana. Sharp made Taos his permanent residence in 1912 and became one of the founders of the Taos Society of Artists. He was an inveterate traveler, returning to his haunts in Montana, and adding California- where he would reside late in life- and Hawaii to his list. He would also return to Europe and head on from there, taking his voracious appetite for new subject matter to Africa, Asia, and South America. In Taos, Sharp lived next door to artist E. I. Couse and two houses and studios today form The Couse-Sharp Historic Site. Eagle Star, who also went by the name Juan Concha as he negotiated the Indigenous, Hispanic, and Anglo worlds in Taos, was one of Sharp’s favorite models. In this painting, named for the model, Sharp sets his subject against the sunlit hollyhocks in the garden outside his studio. The pink of Eagle Star’s shirt seems to break apart into scintillating particles of color that Sharp has formed into flowers with swift, deft strokes. It’s not the shadows that Sharp wants to catch, it’s the parabola of light that surrounds and frames the relaxed Eagle Star, who squints against the brilliance of the sun.

-James D. Balestrieri