Henry Francois Farny

Farny and Sharp painted the West

Artists' work became accurate record of American Indian life

Joseph Henry Sharp, Harvest Dance, 1893-1894, Oil on canvas.

Henry Farny and Joseph H. Sharp were important Cincinnati artists by the 1880s. They distinguished themselves through narrative landscapes of the American West - specifically landscapes populated by American Indians.

Farny was raised near Warren, Pa., and the Seneca tribe. He had begun to draw as a boy, and the Indians intrigued him.

After Farny redesigned the popular McGuffy's Readers, Primers and Speller in 1879, the money for the job gave him some financial independence. In 1881 he made his first trip west to the Dakota territory.

Farny was transfixed by what he saw. He stayed at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for several weeks, sketching the people and their high-plains landscape. When he returned to Cincinnati, he brought back not only sketches, but also artifacts and photographs, and set to work in his studio.

His first Indian canvas, "Toilers of the Plains" was finished in January 1882 and sold almost immediately. After completing a series of illustrations for a magazine piece on the Zuni, he was sent west by Harper's to ride the new Northern Pacific Railroad and capture the ceremony of driving in the last spike.

In Bismarck, N.D., he finally met Sitting Bull and was able to make a number of sketches on the Crow reservation.

Farny traveled west on several more occasions, the last time in 1894 when he sketched Apache, Kiowa and Comanche people on their reservations. His works were critically acclaimed as accurate, detailed depictions of the everyday life on the Plains with compelling narratives.

Farny was as familiar with the government policies surrounding the interactions between whites and Indians as he was with the tribes' everyday lives. However, in an effort to make a good picture, he would forgo a certain amount of accuracy.

Although he recorded American Indian paraphernalia with a thorough knowledge and exacting detail, sometimes he would mix items from various tribes in a single work of art. Avoiding any hint of the dire effects of the removal of Indians from their homelands, he imagined scenes that had taken place before his travels west.

Sharp founded Taos art colony

Sharp also had been fascinated by American Indian lore and in 1883 traveled to the reservations of New Mexico, Arizona and the Pacific Northwest on the advice of his studio neighbor, Henry Farny.

In June 1992, he married Addie Josephine Byram of Liberty, Ind., who traveled with him to Taos in 1893 and every summer thereafter to live among the Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne and Pueblo tribes.

"I guess it was Fenimore Cooper who first attracted me to the Indian," he once said. "Then when I came to know them I liked them for themselves. Perhaps they attracted me as subjects to paint because of their important historical value as the first Americans. Then the color of their costumes and dance, this no less attracted me."

The first painting he made from that first trip to Taos, "Harvest Dance," was purchased immediately by Cincinnati Art Museum.

Sharp was more interested in creating a general impression of American Indian life and in recording the appearance and character of individuals than in telling stories like Farny. Many of his paintings were done directly or en plein air (in open air).

In 1900 the CAM honored him with a one-man show of Indian portraits, and in 1901 federal authorities allowed him to build a cabin and studio at the Crow Indian Reservation near the Custer battlefield.

His much admired paintings were shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design and a large group was placed at the Smithsonian.

In 1912 Sharp moved permanently to Taos where he founded an artists' colony that continues today.

Eventually both artists lost heart by the cultural losses and poor treatment of the Indians. In 1915, a year before his death, Farny said "The Indian painter, like the Indian himself, is of a dying race...The reason is that there are so few Indians worth painting. The Indian is wearing store clothes and acquiring a shabby veneer of civilization."

Sharp continued to record the enduring traditions of the Pueblo peoples until his death in 1953.;Henry Farny was born in Ribeauville, France. His family left France to escape political and religious turmoil following the revolution of 1848. They arrived in the United States when Farny was six, settling in western Pennsylvania near an Iroquois Indian reservation. It was this period of his life that is said to have inspired the work for which he is most famous: his paintings and illustrations of Native Americans and western scenes.

In 1859, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. It was in Cincinnati that Farny received his first training in art. He was able to find work as an illustrator, but eventually moved to New York to work at Harpers' Brothers publishers as a cartoonist and a wood engraver. After an extend trip to Europe, he returned to Cincinnati where he devoted his time to creating illustrations for weekly magazines and children's books.

Farny's best known works took shape after a trip to the West in 1881. During three months in the Dakota Territory, he made sketches and gathered artifacts from the Native American people he met. Upon returning to Cincinnati, he began to paint the nostalgic images of the West that would define his career.

Farny traveled west again only a few times, choosing instead to work as an illustrator and continue his study of the American West through his paintings in Cincinnati. There he became an important member of the arts community and was the founder and director of the Cincinnati Arts Students League.;Farny was born in 1847 in France, but was raised near Warren, Pa., after his family fled to escape Napoleon's regime. It was there that the Seneca tribe intrigued young Farny.

After his father died in 1863, Farny left Woodward High School to help support his family. He became an illustrator in the New York office of Harper's Weekly.

After a year he made his way to Europe. He studied landscape painting before returning to Cincinnati where he worked as an illustrator for magazines, children's books and circus posters.

Farny's best-known work took shape after a three-month trip West to the Dakota Territory in 1881. He had hoped to meet Sitting Bull, but the great Sioux chief had been sent away as a prisoner of war.

Farny stayed on making sketches and gathering artifacts from which he began to paint nostalgic images of the West. These paintings would define his career.

In the following 13 years, Farny made four more trips West to gather material for his paintings, including a 1,000-mile canoe trip down the Missouri River.

Farny painted his subjects in a realistic style but in romantic idealized scenes. Some of the paintings depict incidents that he probably never witnessed.

According to biographer Denny Carter, Farny was primarily a conservative artist. But because of his European training, he was able to incorporate advanced ideas - Japanese printing techniques, the use of photographs, the lighter pallette of the Impressionists - into his work.

"This blend of old and new concepts contributed to Farny's convincing realistic style," he writes, "and accounted for his unique vision."

Farny was also a bohemian, a wit and raconteur who was in great demand as an after-dinner speaker. He counted among his friends Theodore Roosevelt and Sarah Barnhardt and wrote short stories, acted in amateur theatricals and was a talented cabinetmaker.

"His paintings, minutely and accurately described, exhibit a nostalgia for an exotic land and people," Carter says. "Farny told his story of the Indian, but most of all, he painted the Plains Indians' country."