by orotone | Feb 28, 2014 | Orotone
This orotone was featured in portfolio 1 as plate 1 in The North American Indian. The Vanishing Race is the most common of Curtis’s master-prints but its subject matter and beauty make the image highly desirable.
Size 14×17″. Curtis’s original description from the portfolio:
The thought which this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn of their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future. Feeling that the picture expresses so much of the thought that inspired the entire work, the author has chosen it as the first of the series.
by orotone | Feb 27, 2014 | Orotone
This orotone was also featured in The North American Indian as part of portfolio 16 plate 571. At the Old Well of Acoma is not the rarest of Curtis’s master-prints but its subject matter and beauty make the image highly desirable. I purchased this orotone from the granddaughter of the original owner who was a postmaster in Idaho.
Size 11×14″. Curtis’s original description from the portfolio:
Members of Coronado’s army of explorers in 1540 and Espejo in 1583 noted the ‘cisterns to collect snow and water’ on the rock of Acoma.
by orotone | Feb 26, 2014 | Orotone
This orotone from my personal collection is an 11×14. In addition to printing this image as a master-print, Curtis chose to use it as a portfolio photogravure in portfolio one of The North American Indian.
The photogravure is in portfolio one and is plate 27. Curtis’s original explanation of the photograph is:
The Navaho women are, for the greater part, the owners of the flocks, and invariably, with the children, the herders. They are so thoroughly at home on their scrubby ponies that they seem a part of them and probably excel all other Indians as horsewomen.
