Making Pictographs

      During his years in Taos, Sharp was always close friends with and aesthetically allied with his next-door neighbor Eanger Irving Couse. Although they led independent lives, they were inextricably bonded in their choice of subjects and their approach to Native people as subjects for art. This painting, Making Pictographs, has many similarities with Couse’s master paintings of the late teens. Both artists were producing large, allegorical works for their patron Joseph G. Butler, Jr. of Youngstown, Ohio, at that time. Couse had created a large, symbolically historical work in 1916, A Vision of the Past, for Butler’s new museum, then known as the Butler Art Institute. (related image 510a) In that work, Couse attempted to present a multi-generational reflection on the past, a narrative that was spread through the clouds behind the multiple figures. Sharp’s work of a few years later, Making Pictographs, comprises a similar story except that here a young boy is not simply looking but has been assigned the task of actively recording some element of tribal history on an adobe wall.

 

     Sharp’s painting was exhibited at the Hotel Gibson Galleries in Cincinnati in 1919. The painting drew special notice from Sharp's favorite Cincinnati art critic, Mary L. Alexander. She opined that although Sharp was "always enthusiastic about the painting of firelight, … "it is in his delineation of sunlight that he has made the greatest advance." (Cincinnati Times Star, 11/25/1919)  Perhaps because of its dazzling sunshine, Making Pictographs was also especially appealing to children as it was acquired by the Cincinnati Public Schools shortly thereafter. It was used several years later as the primary image on an unidentified 1926 calendar. (related image 510b)

 

Peter H. Hassrick