Joseph Henry Sharp (September 27, 1859 – August 29, 1953) was an American painter and a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, of which he is considered the "Spiritual Father".

President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned him to paint the portraits of 200 Native American warriors who survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

While working on this project, Sharp lived on land of the Crow Agency, Montana, where he built Absarokee Hut in 1905.

[1] He quit school and moved to Cincinnati, where he lived with an aunt and worked to support himself and send money to his mother.

[3] In 1881, Sharp traveled to Europe, where he studied for a year at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium.

[4] In 1885 he traveled to Europe with John Hauser, another Cincinnati artist, who studied with him at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

[3] In 1893, he made his second trip to the American West in the company of fellow Cincinnati artist John Hauser, who had studied in Europe with him.

[1] The Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the local Indian culture sparked his enthusiasm, which he shared with colleagues Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips at Académie Julian the next year.

[1] There he painted scenes of native life and portraits of members of the Plains tribes, including the Crow, Sioux, and Nez Perce.

[1] Sharp came to the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who took an interest in him and commissioned him to paint portraits of 200 Native American warriors who had survived the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

To be able to stay in the area, Sharp apparently made a private arrangement with Samuel Reynolds, the US Indian Commission agent of the Crow Agency, Montana, and gained permission to build a log cabin on government land.

[8][9] Essentially the Crow Agency owned the cabin, which Sharp and his wife Addie built in 1905 with the help of local prison labor, arranged for and mostly supervised by Reynolds.

The ridgepole of the cabin was high enough (16.5 ft.) to allow a balcony at one end, where he hung animal hides and Indian blankets for privacy, to make the space behind it usable as a guest bedroom.

The Sharps furnished the cabin in an Arts and Crafts style and decorated it with their collection of Indian artifacts, which included Navajo rugs, a buffalo robe, shields, pottery, and baskets.

[1] Over his lifetime, Sharp had produced around 10,500 works of art, including oil paintings, etchings, monotypes, pastels, and watercolors.