EDWARD S. CURTIS. Plate 635 Agichide - Assiniboin, 1926. 11.5x15.5" photogravure on 13x17" Holland Van Gelder paper mounted on tattered copper plate paper envelope remnants. Printed 1928. From Portfolio 18, Northern Woodlands and Alberta, Canada, of The North American Indian. Inscribed in ink on print recto: Plate 635 / Agichida - Assiniboin / From Copyright Photograph 1926 by E.S. Curtis / Photogravure Suffolk Eng. Co. Cambridge.

This lot is the first of 29 lots in this auction that contain envelopes that would be used to store the original copper plates when they were not being printed.

Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) created a legacy that was a monumental visual tour de force, an ethnographic, heroic and theatrical record of the American Indian and their recollected and imagined way of life before the white man. His mastery of the grandest pictorial style and technique in his photogravures, orotones and silver and platinum prints were rivaled only by the most elegant prints of Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. During this time, he was the most famous photographer in the country just as Ansel Adams later in the 20th Century.

Between 1898 and 1928 working in collaboration with many tribal members Curtis created an ethno-historical account combined with photographic notions of character portraiture, environmental portraiture and classical romanticism as well as straight documentary views. He published 20 octavo volumes with around 75 prints per volume each accompanied with a larger portfolio of usually 36 hand pulled photogravures. The North America Indian (1906-1928) is considered the most lavish and elegantly illustrated set of photographic books ever produced.

To make the photogravure prints from the negative, Curtis created a positive that he would edit on, and then working with the great photogravure printing companies in Boston, John Andrew & Son that became Suffolk Engraving Company they made over 2200 copper plates from which the photogravures were to be printed. Each plate was stored in an envelope that had a Holland Van Gelder Photogravure attached to it of the copper plate it housed as well as written title information that was to be engraved into the plates and printed on the prints. There are 29 Envelope plate photogravures offered in various lots in this auction. The envelopes themselves only partially survived, tattered and torn.

Fair to Poor. Tears, ink stains, tattering.