Antiques Roadshow painting mystery points to Taos artist

That painting, unidentified at the time, was one featured on the popular PBS television show, “Antiques Roadshow,” during a June 2022 visit to Santa Fe. 

It was then, “a guest named Pam brought in an oil portrait that once hung in Andrew Carnegie's mansion in New York City. After Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie had died, their daughter gifted several pieces in the mansion to the building's employees — one such employee being Pam's father-in-law,” writes Melanie Albanesi, associate digital producer for Antiques Roadshow in a media story.

Carnegie (1835-1919) was known as the “father of modern philanthropy.” A Scottish immigrant, he became one of the “wealthiest and most famous industrialists of his day,” according to his bio at carnegie.org. “Through Carnegie Corporation of New York, the innovative philanthropic foundation he established in 1911, his fortune has since supported everything from the discovery of insulin and the dismantling of nuclear weapons to the creation of Pell Grants and Sesame Street.”

Tribal arts appraiser and fine artist Tony Abeyta, who has family ties to Taos Pueblo, was asked by the show to examine Pam’s painting. The well-known and respected Diné artist from Gallup took note of a faint signature on the painting and stated he believed it to be that of Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953), an artist of Irish descent from Bridgeport, Ohio who, in 1897, “began to spend summers in Santa Fe and Taos and, by 1899, to spend winters at Crow Agency in Montana,” according to his bio at Couse-Sharp.org.

As to the title of the painting or identity of the model, that was inconclusive. “Off camera, Abeyta told Pam that he believed the subject of the portrait to be Leaf Down, a Taos Pueblo Indian girl,” based on his knowledge of Sharp’s extensive experience painting Taos subjects in the early 20th century. But the only way to find out conclusively would be to open up the back of the painting by an expert. This was something Pam was not willing to do at the time. 

“After a producer found a record of Andrew Carnegie purchasing a Sharp painting in 1900, ‘Roadshow’ contacted the Couse-Sharp Historic Site, a research center and museum facility dedicated to the early Taos artists, and spoke to the executive director/curator there, Davison Koenig, to learn more information and determine if the ca. 1900 Sharp painting in question was Pam's, or just one of the many Sharp pieces in Carnegie's collection,” Albanesi writes.

Koenig told the Taos News on Friday (Feb. 3) he was unsure about Abeyta’s initial identification. “My first reaction was 'she doesn't look Pueblo’ and that painting is clearly early 1900 when [Joseph] Henry Sharp, most of his portraits during that period, are Plains and stuff, he's doing in Montana … She looks Plains and turns out, we were right. Because they opened up the painting and guess what? On the verso, it says Spotted Bird That Sings.” It also identifies her as a “Crow Indian Girl.”

Koenig said “It makes sense that she would be Crow, because he's living in Crow Agency, Mont. So, most of his models during that period [when] he's spending his winters in Montana from 1898 to 1910 and it's almost, you know, the vast majority are Blackfeet and Crow because that's the country he's in.”

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a record of who Spotted Bird That Sings was or who her relatives might be. “I don't know anything about her in particular,” he said. “Who was she within the community? It'd be really great to know. But, I just don't have a whole lot of information.”

Koenig said making the connection between the artist, their work and the models they used is an important part of the Couse-Sharp Historic Site’s mission. “It really is frustrating to see publications still coming out and exhibitions being done with Taos paintings, where they're not doing research to find out who the models are, because you know in all reality if it's a portrait or someone close up, we can most likely identify it from the archives we have, from the artists, from the scholars on the artists.”

In addition to the Couse-Sharp Site, the adjacent Lunder Research Center “is helping museums identify paintings because we really can no longer, in good conscience, be hanging paintings without providing more context reference information on who the people are,” Koenig said.

The Lunder Center was created in 2018 when the Lunder Foundation of Portland, Maine announced that it was providing a $600,000 grant to create an archive and research center focused on the Taos Society of Artists. It is a state-of-the-art museum, research library, learning center, archive and exhibit space.

“So that's something we're working very hard to do is to build that archive,” Koenig added. “And that's something we're doing right now, actually, with the Couse photographs [shot as a visual reference for his paintings]. There’s a lot of Couse photographs that we don't know who the models [were] … So it's kind of interesting because now, one of the things we're focusing out now is building a larger reference photography library of Taos.”

The digitization of the Couse photographic negatives has, it turns out, expanded what “originally was a very focused archive is now turning into a much larger archive to help us connect the dots. But it's great because we're realizing that this is very important and, what's great is, museums across the country are now requesting information on the models and that wasn't possible before. So, I think there is a curatorial social shift that we're seeing in the museum world where you have people want to start telling more nuanced stories and providing more information.”

Not only is it valuable as a curatorial resource but Koenig said there is also a very personal connection as well. “I think most of the Pueblo families have no idea that there are this many pieces of artwork that are out there of family members. It would be nice to have that information available, accessible — especially for the families,” he said. “So, we've got our work cut out for us. The problem is, we need to fundraise three-quarters of a million dollars annually to even begin this work and we have no endowment. So, that is my challenge.

Located in the former Mission Gallery and adjacent to the Couse-Sharp Historic Site, The Lunder is “the only research center and museum facility dedicated to the early Taos art colony and the Taos Society of Artists,” according to couse-sharp.org.

“It is the repository for documents and art created, and artifacts collected, by the 12 members of the TSA. Materials include original documents and correspondence, photographic prints and negatives, sketchbooks, original works of art, an extensive library, scholarly papers relating to the group and Native American art and ethnographic items.” It is located at 138 Kit Carson Road.