Apache Camp in Hondo Cañon, New Mexico

     This painting may be an oil that was first exhibited as Apaches in the Aspens at the galleries of Cincinnati’s Gibson Hotel in Sharp’s one-man show titled Indian Paintings in 1920. It is similar, except for technique, however, to another known larger, later, and much brighter work, Apache Camp in the Aspens. (related image 272b) Both paintings picture the glory of autumn in the mountains near Taos, one with the colors slightly muted and the other full of effusive sunlight. In spirit, both paintings are imbued with a sense of optimism and vitality unlike his Montana river scenes with Indians painted at that time, like the elegiac oil of the period, Early Moonlight on the Little Big Horn, Montana (Record 269).

 

     In 1920 the Hondo Cañon attracted many of the artists of Taos. There, the painters could find interesting groups of visiting Apaches and capture their lively interaction with wild nature beneath the billowing canopy of aspens and pines. Ernest Blumenschein was there that fall, and his decorative masterpiece of the joining of nature and Native life, known at that time as Trail Through the Canyon, captured the same spirit as Sharp had except in a far more stylized manner. (related image 272a)

 

Peter H. Hassrick