Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953)

Joseph Henry Sharp is given credit for founding the art colony in Taos.  He spent his first summer in Taos in 1893 and fell in love with the Taos Indians and their multi-storied pueblo.  He felt, however, that the pueblo had withstood over a thousand years and was still there and the Indians had been mostly unaffected by the Spaniards who arrived 300 years earlier, so he felt no urgency to capture them and their surroundings in paint.  His urgency was to capture the Plains Indians in paint because they were in more danger of change and annihilation.   Sharp bought a house in Taos in 1909 and mostly settled there until his death in 1953.

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