Sharp's career stands as one of the most sustained projects of ethnographic painting in twentieth-century American art, a working life of close, attentive observation of the Plains and Pueblo peoples carried on across more than fifty years and through more than ten thousand finished works.
Sharp came to art through difficulty. The near-fatal childhood swimming accident that left him largely deaf cut short the conventional schooling available to him in his Ohio town and turned him toward visual art at a young age. The move to Cincinnati to live with an aunt placed him in the most active art-teaching environment in the central United States, and his early enrolment in art training there gave him a thorough grounding in academic drawing and painting before he was twenty.
The European trips of the 1880s and 1890s extended that training in several different directions. His first travels gave him the heavy academic technique then associated with the leading German and Belgian schools; his Paris work placed him within the disciplined French academic tradition; and his exposure to the Barbizon and Impressionist painters gave him a freer, more atmospheric handling that would inflect his later landscapes and portraits. After each trip he returned to the Cincinnati Art Academy, where he taught for many years, and to the American West, where he was already painting Native American subjects in the Columbia River basin and across the plains.
The decisive shift in his career came at the turn of the twentieth century. The Little Bighorn portrait commission brought him into sustained contact with the Plains peoples, and the Crow Agency commission gave him a working base in Indian country and a clearly defined ethnographic project, a studio in Montana built for the explicit purpose of making a visual record of the people who had fought Custer. He spent his summers in Montana and his winters increasingly in the Southwest, working between the two regions for the next decade.
The Hearst purchase gave him the financial independence to give up teaching and concentrate on the work full time. He continued to refine his Taos and Plains practice across the next decade, and the permanent move to Taos that followed brought him into the working community of younger painters that would become the Taos Society of Artists. The Society's founding gave the loose group of friends a formal institutional structure, and Sharp, older and more experienced than the other members, was the figure around whom the group consolidated.
The body of work he left at his death is one of the largest single-artist outputs of any twentieth-century American painter. The finished works, and the much larger archive of sketches, photographs, and notes that supports them, constitute a sustained visual record of Plains and Pueblo culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has continued to be studied as both art and ethnographic document in the decades since his death.