A

Call
S I LE N T

Joseph Henry Sharp’s Vision of

the Crow can be seen in his
masterpiece Call of the War Chief.
By James D. Balestrieri

R
ippling from a lodgepole like a pennant in a parapet’s
breeze, the eagle-feather warbonnet is the “call” in Joseph
Henry Sharp’s magnificent oil Call of the War Chief, Crow
Reservation, which will be sold at auction as part of The Russell live
auction March 20 in Great Falls, Montana. In other cultures, the call
might be a cry, the blare of a post horn, or—better—the peal of a
chapel bell. In short, a sound. Had it been any one of these, Sharp—
who lost his hearing after a falling into a swift river while playing
when he was a boy—wouldn’t have heard it.
They say the other senses compensate and sharpen when one
sense is diminished or lost, though the history of the arts shows us
that this isn’t always the case. After all, Beethoven never heard a
measure of his late quartets or his Ninth Symphony—not outside the
prodigious invention in his mind.
In Sharp’s case, the loss of his hearing led directly to a life in art.
Young Sharp loved the outdoors, lapped up Cooper’s
Leathertstocking Tales and was fascinated by a group of Native
Americans he had seen passing through on the train on their way
to Washington. School not so much. His propensity to doodle only
grew with his inability to understand his teachers and he is said to
have filled a pad he carried, ostensibly to help him communicate,
with drawings. By the age of 14, Sharp was in the big city, Cincinnati,
studying art at the McMicken School.
Despite his deafness, Sharp had a peripatetic nature, a restless
yearning for new places, new sights for his eyes to feast on and for
him to paint.
In 1881, Sharp studied in Antwerp, Belgium, then returned to
America and went on the first of his journeys to the West, traveling
and painting Native Americans in New Mexico, Arizona, California
and Wyoming. Sharp went back to Europe in 1885, where he studied
in Munich and Paris, and in Italy with Frank Duveneck, and found
lifelong inspiration in Goya’s work when he visited Spain. Back
in Cincinnati, Sharp married and began to teach. But in 1893 he

Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), Call of the War Chief,

Crow Reservation, oil on canvas, 30 x 36". Available at The Russell.
Estimate: $750/950,000

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 Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), Preparing for the Medicine Sweat, ca. 1922, oil on canvas, 16 x 19⁄". Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, WY.
Gift in memory of Charles Dean Cook. 5.74.

went west once again, and made his first visit

to Taos. Two years later, Sharp decided to
continue his studies at the Académie Julian in
Paris. He copied Old Masters like Frans Hals—
whose portraiture would greatly influence his
own—and, crucially, met Ernest Blumenschein,
Bert Geer Phillips and E. I. Couse. Sharp
extolled the beauties and virtues of Taos as a
place where a true American art might develop
and flourish, planting the seed of the first
migration of artists, a migration that would lead
to the founding of the Taos Society and to the
centrality of Taos in American arts and letters.
Cincinnati then, and trips west, to Montana
now, where Sharp camped near the site of the
Battle of the Little Bighorn. President Theodore
Roosevelt saw and admired the paintings
Sharp did there and arranged for a cabin to be
built for the artist on the Crow Agency. Sharp
would paint hundreds of portraits of survivors
Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), The Summer Camp, ca. 1906, oil on canvas, 15⁄ x 24⅛".
Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, WY. Whitney Purchase Fund. 23.61. of the Battle of the Little Bighorn as well as

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Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), Red Willow Camp in Winter, oil on canvas, 20 x 24". Courtesy Michael and Andrea Frost.
many other likenesses of Native Americans,
their lives, livelihoods and ceremonies. When
Phoebe Hearst purchased 80 of his paintings,
Sharp became financially independent and
began to divide his time between Montana
and Taos. He settled in Taos in 1912, but from
there he would travel to the West Coast and
Hawaii, to Europe, Africa, Asia and South
America. He would also revisit Montana on
numerous occasions. The Gilcrease Museum,
which holds more of the artist’s work than
any other institution, gave Sharp a career
retrospective in 1949. The great man passed
away four years later, in 1953.
With the sweep of his life and career in
mind, look again at Call of the War Chief. Since
the headdress is a visual sign, a silent call, if
you will, it would have to have been noticed—
and how did it get up there in the first place?
Sharp makes this a game of hide and seek,
placing a clump of birches between us and the
teepee. The lodgepoles blend in with their tall,
slender trunks. After all, what were they, until
recently, if not tall, slender trunks? The artist
invites us to make an important association
here, closely linking the evolution of the design
and construction of the teepee with its sources.
Nature sustains the Crow, as it sustains all
living things, but Sharp’s visual superimposition
suggests not only that the Crow understand their
world, but that they abide on a harmonious
continuum with it. We see the headdress
through the all-but-barren branches of the trees,
trees that, in this season, are all potential life,
what the poet Dylan Thomas called, “the force
that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
What does it take to earn the title and
position of War Chief among the Crow? What
does it mean? Traditionally, a member of
the Crow had to complete four feats of valor
before becoming a war chief: counting coup,
or touching a foe without killing him; taking
a weapon from an enemy; commanding a
triumphant war party; and entering the enemy’s
camp at night and stealing a horse. Based on
dreams, visions and medicine, war chiefs
would divine where there might be horses or
game, where and when an enemy would be,
when to go to war, and when not to.
I began to feel that I was a little out of my
element here, that any spin I put on the meaning
of the hanging headdress would be speculative.
I’d be lucky to get anywhere near the truth. So
I put out my own call. My first email was to
Ted Trotta of Trotta-Bono, an esteemed dealer
of antique American Indian art and an ardent
student of Native American material culture
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 Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), Crow Evening Camp, ca. 1925, oil on Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), Medicine Crow, 1904, oil on
canvas, 14 x 10". Courtesy J. N. Bartfield Galleries, New York City. canvas, 21 x 15". Gilcrease Museum. Gift of the Thomas Gilcrease
Foundation, 1955. 0137.436.

and practice. Trotta replied: “Individuals have vision

quests to establish their sacred associations for the
benefit of community. The procession to the lodge
would in some way be to share and amplify the
prayers of the group…The length of the trailer suggests
many honors. The headdress is presumably hung in a
tree here to announce the lodge’s occupant is of great
stature. Every element reveals an autobiographical
reference. All who see this most prestigious of
accoutrements would recognize the owner belongs to
a specific warrior society. Additionally, the headdress
is a sacred item, alive, and it is being nourished by
being exposed to the powers of the sun, the primary
cosmological manitou (spirit) of the upper world.”
Vision quest, a procession to amplify prayers,
the living headdress. The mise-en-scene of Call
of the War Chief might be a first snow in late fall,
but after reading Trotta’s words, I see it as late
winter on its way to spring—perhaps because
I am looking at images of the painting “in the
bleak midwinter,” as the hymn goes. When, and
under what circumstances we see a work of art
Addie Sharp Sweeping Cabin, Crow Agency, ca. 1903. Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody,
is a largely unmined vein of inquiry. I see those Wyoming; MS22 Joseph Henry Sharp collection, P.22.531

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Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), February Chinook, oil on canvas, 20 x 30". Courtesy Scottsdale Art Auction.
few yellow leaves on the trees as survivors,
tenacious beings hanging on, keeping their
echo of beauty through the long cold season.
Late fall or early spring, the sun is a sign of
a break in the weather, and, perhaps, of an
openness to new visions.
I sent out another call, this time to Davison
Koenig, executive director and curator of
the Couse-Sharp Historic Site, who quickly
connected me to Alicia Harris, a PhD candidate
in Native American Art History at the University
of Oklahoma. She remembered something in
Robert H. Lowie’s landmark American Museum
of Natural History study, The Religion of the
Crow Indians, and suggested I take a look.
Harris reminded me that while Lowie spent a
great deal of time among the Crow, interviewing
them and recording their practices, it’s best not
to get too attached to his somewhat outdated
analyses. Still, the book proved an invaluable
resource as I investigated the possible source
and meaning of the bonnet on the lodgepole.
First, Lowie writes, “As an offering the
sweatbathers would tie red cloth to a stick and
lean it against the sweatlodge. Little-rump says
that the stick with the red cloth, for which an
eagle wing might be substituted, was put on
top of the lodge and the owner would say,
addressing Old-woman’s-grandson, “I have
made this sweatlodge because you told me
to make it…I give you this red cloth (or eagle
wing).” On the red cloth were marked stars
or moons and sometimes a circle to represent
the sun. The owner sat on the left side for one
entering and would sing songs; all who came in
were expected to sing.”
Red cloth and an eagle’s wing. Not a bonnet
or headdress, but getting closer. Then, reading on
in Lowie, not in connection with a sweatlodge
this time, but as a prayerful offering to the buffalo:
“Buffalo were scared off and the people asked
Big-Shoulder, one of One-Horn’s friends,
whether he could get the game nearer to them.
He had a bonnet made of a buffalo head with
the horns and hung it high upon a pole. Then
he told the people that the buffalo were going
to come close to the camp.”
Harris added key details: “I noticed that a few
of the people in the procession are also carrying
what look like drums or maybe bed rolls? The
person to the extreme right, and another with his
head covered wearing a cream colored blanket
both have bundles at their backs. Perhaps they
have been called to the tipi to make preparations
for a raid or to enter into prayer?”
Harris’ note reinforces Trotta’s and echoes
Lowie. Call of the War Chief is a call to prayer
after a chief’s vision. The community, united
in prayer, would help determine a course of
action that the chief’s vision, often a symbolic
one, indicates. Sharp knew and painted several
Crow War Chiefs, Medicine Crow for one.
Did Sharp see this “Call,” or is it something he
heard stories of? Hard to say.
Somewhere in Taos a church bell tolled
for Joseph Sharp after his funeral; I hope that
somewhere along the Little Big Horn a red
pennant, or an eagle’s wing, or the feathers of a
war bonnet rippled in the wind on a lodgepole
in honor and memory of an artist who, though
he could not hear, heard the world through the
visions of his art.
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