2025 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction40 / 48 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Titled
Old War Chief and Son is housed in its original McLindberg Duncan frame.
According to Patricia Janis Broder, “Joseph Henry Sharp was the spiritual father of the Taos Society of Artists. He was the first of the Taos Founders to visit New Mexico and to record life at the Taos Pueblo in sketches, paintings, magazine illustrations, and articles. His enthusiastic descriptions of an Indian world that had remained relatively unchanged despite over three hundred years of contact with Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo cultures and his appreciation of the beauty of the sunlit valleys and mountains of northern New Mexico sparked the imaginations of Bert Phillips and Ernest Blumenschein, whose arrival in Taos in 1898 marked the beginning of a permanent art colony.
“Sharp’s personal goal was to create a visual record of what he believed were America’s vanishing Indian cultures. Nicknamed the ‘Anthropologist,’ he was both anthropologist and poet. In the course of his career he completed oil paintings, watercolors, etchings, prints, and photographs of the Indians from diverse regions of the West.”
The artist reflected, “I was first attracted to the human side of the Indian; the character of the old warriors I found particularly interesting. Their romance and idealism are the most beautiful symbols brought down in the annals of time; their religion, their legends and superstitions are all unique. Not these alone, however, brought the greatest influence to bear on my work. It was more the humanity of the present, the aspect we can see, know and feel that was my greatest inspiration.”
PROVENANCE
The artist
Ralph Parker Dixon, Sr., Cincinnati, Ohio
By descent through family
Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, Arizona, 2016
Private collection, California
