Edward S. Curtis

a unique object, the original copper photogravure printing plate for Bear’s Belly—Arikara, Plate 150 from The North American Indian, Portfolio V, numbered in the image, the title, plate number, and publisher’s credit engraved in the margin, 1909

Edward S. Curtis: The North American Indian, The Complete Portfolios (Köln, 1997), p. 209

Ralph W. Andrews, Curtis’ Western Indians (New York, 1962), p. 108

The North American Indians: A Selection of Photographs by Edward S. Curtis (Aperture, 1972), unpaginated

Florence Curtis Graybill and Victor Boesen, Edward Sheriff Curtis: Visions of a Vanishing Race (Boston, 1976), pl. 22

Barbara A. Davis, Edward S. Curtis: The Life and Times of a Shadow Catcher (San Francisco, 1985), p. 123

Christopher Cardozo, ed., Native Nations: First Americans As Seen By Edward Curtis (Boston, 1993), cover and p. 101

Laurie Lawlor, Shadow Catcher: The Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis (New York, 1994), p. 81

Christopher Cardozo, ed., Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian (New York, 2000), p. 12

The present lot comprises Edward Curtis’s original photogravure printing plate for one of his most famous Native American portraits, Bear’s Belly – Arikara.  All of the extant large-format photogravures of this image were printed from the plate offered here.  The three-dimensionality of this polished copper plate offers a wholly new experience, one that is distinct from Curtis’s gravures, photographic prints, and orotones.  The plate is a unique work from the oeuvre of one of our most important photographers, and a primary document of one of the most significant publishing ventures of the 20^th century. 

Curtis’s 20-volume, 20-folio work, The North American Indian: Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of United States and Alaska, began publication in 1907 and was finally completed in 1930.  The distinctive feature of the work was Curtis’s unparalleled photographic documentation of all aspects of Native American life. Each of the work’s images, in large and small formats, was printed from a carefully prepared photogravure plate, such as the one offered here.  For each gravure, the photographic image was transferred from Curtis’s glass-plate negative onto a copper plate, and then chemically etched.  Prints from these plates possessed a photographic quality unattainable through any other photomechanical process.  

The quality of the photogravures was of primary importance to Curtis throughout the publication of The North American Indian.  In 2005, at the Braun Research Library, Autry National Center in Los Angeles, Curtis scholar Bruce Kapson unearthed a 44-year cache of correspondence between Curtis and Frederick Webb Hodge, editor of The North American Indian.  Throughout this decades-long exchange, Curtis describes in detail the meticulous care he continually took with his photoengraver to perfect the imagery on the copper plates.

The subject of this photograph, Bear’s Belly, of the North Dakotan Arikara tribe, was born in 1847 in the Native American trading village of Fort Clark. As a young man he served in the United States Army as a scout, and later became a member of the medicine fraternity within his tribe.  In text Volume V of The North American Indian, Curtis transcribes Bear’s Belly’s harrowing account of how he acquired the bearskin he wears in this portrait. 

While Bear’s Belly—Arikara has become one of Curtis’s most iconic images, it is known today exclusively as a photogravure.  Curtis never made an orotone of the image, and no photographic prints have been located.  This rarity enforces the significance of the unique photogravure plate offered here.