Ogalalla Sioux Indian Scout

     Many of Sharp’s earliest Indian paintings were made in Cincinnati at the Buffalo Bill Wild West show in the late 1890s (Fenn, 2007, 62) but this oil was wrongly identified, contrary to the artist's later recollections, as his very first formal Indian portrait. Ogalalla Fire, as this sitter was known to Sharp, had been stranded in Cincinnati in the early 1880s and came to the attention of Sharp and his mentor, Henry Farny. Ogalalla Fire stayed around town, becoming a janitor at the Cincinnati Art Club, where Sharp and Farny were charter members, and posing for Farny in such masterworks as The Song of the Talking Wire. (1904, The Taft Museum, Cincinnati)

 

     Sharp painted this portrait in 1898. He had been traveling through the Southwest from Oklahoma to New Mexico for part of the past year, all the time painting portraits. This, then, was nothing really new, though it may have been the first finished Indian portrait he sold to a prominent collector. In 1899 he participated in a group show in Cincinnati in which this portrait was featured. It apparently sold from that exhibition to Joseph G. Butler, Jr. of Youngstown, Ohio and could have been Sharp's first real commercial incentive derived from a serious patron. Butler ended up acquiring dozens more of Sharp’s works over the next two decades.

 

     There are two other extant versions of this Sioux man painted by Sharp at the time. One was displayed at the Cincinnati Museum in 1900 and the other at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY in 1901. (related images 92 and 92a)

 

Peter H. Hassrick