The Oil Promoter

     When Sharp exhibited his year’s work at Cincinnati’s Traxel Art Galleries in December 1920, the lead painting in the catalogue was The Oil Promoter. Similar in composition and scale to The Young Chief’s Mission (Record 281) that he had sold to Joseph Butler the preceding year, this new work is more colorful and more precise in theme.          

 

     The figure on the left wears a Sioux feather war bonnet that Sharp frequently used in his paintings. Dressed then as a chief, he and the oil promoter exchange direct gazes as if they are the two primary protagonists. Sharp, though, wrote about the painting’s narrative as if the negotiations would affect a broad segment of Native people. “A shrewd Indian ‘business’ man who has learned some of the tricks of civilization and is evidently the agent of some land-grabbing syndicate,” he told an associate in 1921, “is trying to induce some innocent victims to sign away their rights to prospective oil lands.” (Fenn, 2007, 45) Sharp’s comments reveal that the artist sided with the potential victims and not the oil interests.

 

     It is a bit ironic that Sharp’s major patron, Thomas Gilcrease, was an Indian oil promoter, one successful enough to earn him a fortune and enable him to afford to buy over two hundred Sharp works.

 

Peter H. Hassrick