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Painter. A childhood hearing loss curtailed Sharp's conventional schooling in his native Bridgeport, Ohio, but his artistic skill eneabled him to enroll at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati at the age of fourteen. In 1881 he went off to Europe, the first of three study trips abroad, each of which was followed by visits to New Mexico and the Columbia River basin. He spent part of the summer of 1893 in Taos and passed on word of its artistic resources to Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, whom he had met in Paris in 1895. For two decades, he divided his time between teaching at the Cincinnati Art Academy, sketching in the Northwest, and summering at Taos, where he finally established a permanent residence in 1912. Sharp was a charter member of the Taos Society of Artists, with which he exhibitied for many years. His favorite subject was the Indian and his fast-disappearing lifestyle. Sharp drew and painted with a facility and accuracy that gave his work ethnographic as well as artistic value.

References
C.M. Russell Museum. Joseph Henry Sharp and the Lure of the West. (Great Falls, Mont.: C.M. Russell Museum, 1978).

Broder. Taos: A Painter's Dream.

Fenn. The Beat of the Drum and the Whoop of the Dance.

Charles Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William H. Truettner Art in New Mexico, 1900–1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1986)