Two Leggins, Crow Chief

Joseph Henry Sharp was a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists and one of the earliest painters to document the lives and portraits of Native American peoples of the Plains and Southwest. His 1900 portrait of Two Leggins, a distinguished Crow war chief, belongs to a large body of work Sharp undertook partly at the urging of Theodore Roosevelt, who feared Native cultures were disappearing. Two Leggins was a historically significant figure whose own autobiography, dictated to a researcher decades later, became an important ethnographic document. Sharp's portrait seeks ethnographic honesty, recording regalia and physiognomy with sympathetic realism at a time when many such images were frankly exploitative.

The portrait employs a dark, warm ground from which the subject's face and ceremonial attire emerge with quiet intensity. Brushwork is confident and direct in the face, more broadly handled in the costume details. The palette of earth reds, ochres, and muted blues reflects both the subject's dress and Sharp's tonal preferences.