Joseph Henry Sharp
The genesis of the Taos Art Colony began with Joseph Henry Sharp, who first visited Taos in 1893. He publicized the town's qualities in illustrations contributed to popular magazines and by encouraging fellow artists to visit Taos.1 Like most other painters associated with the Taos Society of Artists active between 1915 and 1927, Sharp embraced the academic tradition, studying periodically between 1881 and 1898 with trained artists or in academies located in America or Europe. The application of his rigorously developed skills to the subject of Native American culture formed the basis of his artistic career.
Sharp was fortunate to find several patrons around 1902 who routinely purchased the Native American portraits he painted at the turn of the century, among whom were Phoebe Hearst in California and Joseph G. Butler, Jr. in Ohio. Sharp's Native American heads, which had also been purchased by the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in 1902, were frequently identified as historical documents, but Sharp clearly intended to be known not just as an historian, but as an artist. (Source: Butler Institute of Art online collections catalogue,
