Blackfoot Girl

Blackfoot Girl at the Smithsonian American Art Museum represents a shift in Sharp's subject community: where most of his Smithsonian portraits show Crow men, this canvas depicts a young female subject from the Blackfoot Nation, a different Plains people whose territory extended from Montana into southern Alberta. The Blackfoot and Crow had historically been enemies, and Sharp's movement between communities reflected his desire to document a wider range of Native American individual identity. A young female subject also placed him in the tradition of sympathetic documentation that distinguished his work from the romantic-heroic male focus of much Western painting.

Sharp's treatment of a younger female subject employs the same warm, direct technique as his male portraits, avoiding both sentimentality and the exoticising tendency of less careful painters. The figure is presented with the same observational honesty as his Crow warriors, within the consistent format of his portrait series.