Joe Sharp, Henry Farny, John Houser; all were painters of Indians, and all of them lived in Cincinnati. Now there's a fourth name to add to the list, Joseph Scheuerle, whose paintings are bringing collectors to Cincinnati Art Galleries to rediscover a forgotten painter.

        Crowds lined up Thursday outside the gallery to pay $100 for the chance to buy a portrait of a Cheyenne, Blackfoot or Crow Indian by an artist who never sold an Indian portrait in his life.

        Now the paintings are selling for between $3,500 and $12,000. The $100 admission to the exhibition opening is a benefit for the American Indian College Fund.

        “He loved the Indians he painted and he loved the paintings,” Cincinnati Art Galleries owner Randy Sandler says. “He wanted to keep the whole collection together and sell it to a museum, but that didn't work out.”

        Mr. Scheuerle died in 1948 without finding a buyer for his collection. Mr. Sandler acquired the paintings from a collector who had purchased them from the Scheuerle family.

        Born in Austria in 1873, he came with his family to Cincinnati in 1884 and attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1892-1896. He worked as an illustrator at the Strobridge Lithographing Co., doing posters for wild west shows and circuses.

        By 1905 he was working in Chicago and soon spent his summers in the West painting Indians. He became friends with Joseph Sharp and Charlie Russell (the most popular painter of the West in his day) and often corresponded with them.

        The Indians he liked to paint were mostly old men who had memories of the Indian wars. Many of them told him that they had participated in the Custer massacre, and he was eager to believe them.

        He encouraged them to wear their traditional garb, feathered headdresses and all, although by the time he met them, most Indians dressed as farmers. He was a cartoonist, and his portraits often exaggerate facial features in a cartoon-like manner.

        Like Winold Reiss, who created the mosaic murals in Union Terminal, Mr. Scheuerle painted Indian portraits for calendars published by the Great Northern Railroad, starting in 1907. But his paintings went beyond commercial work.

        For 20 years he traveled to Montana most summers adding to his portfolio of 200 paintings. They are all watercolors and on the back of each one he wrote about the subject and the circumstances surrounded the sitting, illustrating many of his writings with comic sketches.

        Today there are scores of Indian painters in the West, re-creating imaginary scenes of Indian life in a fanciful, romanticized way. Mr. Scheuerle understood that the culture he was documenting was all but over.

        The Indians he met in 1938 “all drive cars today and think nothing of visiting places hundreds of miles from home,” he wrote on the back of one of his paintings. Painted on the spot, his portraits are a late effort to preserve glimpses of a traditional culture that was fading away.

        Joe Scheuerle and His Indian Gallery is at Cincinnati Art Galleries, 225 E. Sixth St., downtown, through Nov. 30. Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Phone 381-2128. www.cincinnatiartgalleries.com.
       

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