Joseph H. Sharp (1859-1953)

From 1930, Joseph Sharp vacationed in Hawai’i for several winters, where he painted only for his pleasure. Originally from Bridgeport, Ohio, he was one of the earliest artists to paint American Indian portraits. President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned him to do two hundred portraits of the surviving warriors of the battle of Little Big Horn. Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst, purchased eighty of his Indian paintings, thus enabling him to continue his art career. His art education included time at the Cincinnati Art Academy, the Royal Academies in Antwerp and Munich, and the Academie Julian in Paris. Over his lifetime, Sharp had produced around 10,500 works of art, including oil paintings, etchings, monotypes, pastels, and watercolors. Of these works, fully 7,800 are of Native American subjects, including 3,200 portraits. He was a historian of the West and a painter and helped to preserve the record of a way of life that was changing.