Edward Sheriff Curtis Art for Sale and Sold Prices

Photographer, Painter, b. 1868 - d. 1952

(b White Water, Wisconsin, 1868; d Whittier, California, 1952) American photographer. Edward Curtis became interested in the American Indians his family moved to Minnesota around 1874. The teenage Curtis built his own crude cameras and taught himself the rudiments of photography. His first Indian portrait was taken in 1895—a portrait of “Princess Angeline.” The experience inspired Curtis’s most influential work, The North American Indian, an ambitious project started in 1898 to document every Native American tribe west of Mississippi. The North American Indian was supported by many people, including financier J. Pierpont Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote the forward for The North American Indian, calling the endeavor “a service not only to our people, but to the world of scholarship everywhere.” Curtis’s motives for The North American Indian were complex. More than a series of breathtaking photographs, they also reflect a romantic belief that his subjects were the original and noble people of North America, and its text also collects a massive array of ethnographic information on the Indian tribes. When The North American Indian ended in 1930, leaving Curtis deep in debt, his work revealed view of the Indians of North America so close to the origin of humanity, retaining a sense of themselves with innate dignity and self-possession. Though his scholarship was self-taught and somewhat erratic, Curtis’s works present a view of the Indian, and of America itself, that is at once expansive and intimate. (Credit: Christie’s, New York, Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts including America, December 16, 2004, Lot 661)