Joseph Henry Sharp was the "Spiritual Father" of the Taos Society of Artists, the most senior of its founding members and the first European-American artist to make sustained painting trips to Taos in the 1890s, and the most prolific recorder of Plains and Pueblo Native American life of his generation, with more than 7,800 paintings of Native subjects produced over a working life of nearly seventy years.
Joseph Henry Sharp (September 27, 1859 – August 29, 1953) was an American painter, the most senior founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, and one of the most prolific painters of Native American life in twentieth-century American art. Born in Bridgeport, Ohio, to Irish parents, he was largely deafened by a near-drowning as a child and turned early to art, enrolling at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati at fourteen and continuing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He made the first of three European study trips in 1881, and in the early 1890s studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he absorbed both the Barbizon school and the Impressionists.
He first visited Taos in 1893, in the company of the painter John Hauser, becoming one of the earliest European-American artists to work in the region. President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned him to paint portraits of two hundred Native American warriors who had survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn; in 1901 the Crow Agency commissioned him to build a studio in Montana to make a visual record of the Plains peoples; and after a major purchase of eighty of his paintings by Phoebe Hearst allowed him to leave teaching, he made his permanent move to Taos in 1912. He was one of the six founding members of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915 and is generally described as the group's "Spiritual Father." His work, some 10,500 paintings, prints, and works on paper, of which approximately 7,800 are of Native American subjects and 3,200 are portraits, is held in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa (the largest single holding), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others.