Provenance: The artist Closson’s Gallery, Cincinnati, OH Private collection, Ohio Private collection, Wyoming Joseph Henry Sharp’s legacy is thoroughly anchored in Northern New Mexico, where his Taos studio still draws visitors who pilgrimage to see the famous locations of the Taos Society of Artists. And yet key trips to Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota were just as influential on Sharp, who was driven by his need to see Native Americans on their own lands. For Wind River Country – Wyo, Sharp paints the Shoshone people in a magnificent winter scene. The piece, marked for sale at $450 in a note on the back, likely originated from Sharp’s stay on the Crow Agency in Montana. “Of Sharp’s painting locales, Crow Agency is the one that most enhanced his reputation as an ‘Indian painter.’ Crow Agency served as a home base from which to seek out the surviving warriors in the neighboring Indian agencies of the Blackfeet, Sioux, Cheyennes, Shoshones, and Arapahos,” writes Marie Watkins in The Life & Art of Joseph Henry Sharp. “This meant traveling by stage or wagon 50 to 150 miles to remote places where he…would spend weeks at a time. Determined to paint as many Plains Indians as he could, he declared that he would paint all the ‘old fighters’ whom death didn’t take first.”