Along the Little Horn

Oil painting on canvas "Along the Little Horn" by Joseph Sharp. It depicts a winter scene with a tipi on the proper right of the foreground behind bare aspen-like trees. A Native American woman stands to the proper left of the tipi. A river with shrubs runs through the middle ground. Additional trees line the background under hazy light blue and yellow skies. H 30" x W 40"

Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953) was an American painter and a charter member of the Taos Society of Artists. He trained at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati and in Europe. He focused much of his work on depicting Native Americans living in the western United States. Early in his career, he taught at the Cincinnati Art Academy, painted portraits of local members of society, and received commissions from publications such as "Harper's Weekly." By the early 1900s, patronage from the likes of President Roosevelt, the Smithsonian, Joseph G. Butler, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst (mother of William Randolph Hearst) allowed Sharp to devote his time entirely to painting. Sharp produced an enormous body of work including thousands of paintings, etchings, monotypes, and pastels. Sharps work is noted as having artistic, historical, and anthropological value.

The painting was acquired by John B. Kendrick (1857-1933), U.S. Senator (1917-1933) and the ninth Governor of Wyoming (1915-1917), after his daughter saw the painting at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. The painting hung in the Wyoming Governor's Mansion and later in the family's home in Washington, D.C.