VERSO
Titled

Sharp biographer Marie Watkins emphasized not only Sharp’s deep engagement with the landscapes and communities of the American West but also the crucial role that individual sitters – including Crucita – played in shaping his artistic vision. Watkins explained: “Joseph Henry Sharp chose Montana as his first home in the West, living on the Crow Agency Indian reservation in order to harmonize his life with his art. Taos would follow as his second western home. Sharp’s several thousand representations of Native peoples form an integral part of both western narrative painting and ethnological portraiture. ‘Painter of Indians’ became his brand identity. This epithet, however, is simplistic, if not misleading. He was also a prolific landscape and still-life painter. While migrating between primary residences in Montana and New Mexico, he painted the same sites over and over in different seasons and in different lights in a constant dialogue with nature. He never passed an opportunity to stop at places and visit with people. He sketched, scribbled, drew, and painted on whatever surface was at hand. Working with an ever-present cigar in hand, Sharp often painted on cigar box lids, using them as a handy substrate in the West’s far-flung plains and mountain ranges.

“Taos had given the artist new directions and new models.… As Sharp would have been aware, the association of women and flowers has an art historical pedigree reaching back to the ancient world, representing spring or the sense of smell, or both. In Sharp’s own past, however, he had possibly seen in Paris the pairing of women and flowers in the works of Gustave Courbet, Frédéric Bazille, and Edgar Degas (among others), part of an international artistic production of women in conjunction with bouquets. Crucita may be the first Native American portrayed in this genre.

“From her first steps as a model for Sharp in 1913, Crucita would dominate his female imagery and motifs. In the paintings in which she appears, she is variously posed solo, part of a couple, as a family member, or among a group of women; seated on the ground, floor, or banco; in an adobe interior, garden, or Taos valley; in firelight or sunlight; decorating pottery, shelling corn, or arranging flowers; and in juxtaposition with a variety of ceramic vessels, woven baskets, or textiles. One Cincinnati reviewer summed it up well in the 1930s: ‘What would a collection be without the lovely Crucita!’ Her daughter Leaf Down followed in her footsteps.”

PROVENANCE
The artist, ca. 1940
Samuel Evan and Florence Riddick Boys, Plymouth, Indiana
Present owner, by descent

• Joseph Henry Sharp’s Past Results

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