Portrait of Taos Indian

In 1893, Joseph Henry Sharp became the first academically trained artist to visit Taos. He later shared his experience with Ernest Blumenschein, who came to Taos with fellow artist Bert Phillips in 1898, marking the beginning of the Taos arts colony. For decades, Sharp spent a portion of the year in Taos and the other portion on the Crow Agency in Montana. He painted numerous portraits of sitters in both locations, often in traditional dress as a means of preserving images of peoples and their cultures that he feared would disappear of change irrevocably because of adversarial government policies and modernity. This portrait of an unnamed sitter was painted with this mission in mind.