Taos Canyon

       Sharp’s favorite art critic, Mary L. Alexander, writing in the Cincinnati Enquirer in early December 1929, observed that over “the last four or five years Mr. Sharp’s taste has been slowly changing; his interest in Indian life has lagged; his love of landscape and flower painting has grown apace.” Alexander was most profoundly struck by Sharp’s mountain views, splashed with golden sunlit cottonwood trees set against richly hued, violet and hunter green distant hills. “His palette seems to have burst into flame,” she explained. And his artistic method and style had been transformed to accommodate and reveal this heightened splendor. “The dominance of a new technique—broader, simpler and more vigorous—may explain the change.” She had just seen a display of thirty-four Sharp paintings presented at Cincinnati’s Traxel Art Galleries and concluded, “His landscapes, I am sure, are his most spontaneous and enthusiastic contribution.” (Enquirer, 12/1/1929)

 

     Sharp’s Taos Canyon, which is thought to have been one of two similarly titled works in the exhibition, stood out among the other landscapes by incorporating a small but animating group of Pueblo Indian riders ambling slowly up a road into the mountain canyon. Compared to another, equal-sized landscape in the show, Green and Gold (related image 603), Taos Canyon is more naturalistic and compositionally inviting.  

 

Petr H. Hassrick