Help
Welcome to the new Curtis Collection site. The Curtis Collection consists of the historic copper photogravure plates of Edward S. Curtis that were made to print his life work,
The North American Indian.
The Curtis Collection has selected 250 copper photogravure plates to be offered to the public directly from us and through The Bruce Kapson Gallery. Click on the Buy a Plate link to enter another area on the site where you can search for specific plates and their prices. Searches are by Tribe and Subject, as on our main home page and by Name and Price. Each product comes with Certificates of Authenticity.
We are offering these plates in various formats: plate alone (through Bruce Kapson), framed with a Curtis “Vintage Print” in a Traditional or Modern Collage Mat style or Matted with the vintage print, back to back for self framing or collection. There are links for whom to contact, based on the plate in which you have interest..
We will also be adding Curtis Collection Movies to our site, explaining further the value and history of these plates. Don’t miss them!
We continue to redesign the site to make searching for the massive amount of both imagery and factual data, most directly from
The North American Indian, easier to find and also allows for a visitor to find what they want to see much more quickly.
The site is divided into searches for imagery or written information.
If you want to search our database for images, you may do so by tribe only, by subject only, or by a combination, first searching tribe, than selecting a subject from the specific pull down menu below relating to that tribe. If you want to search only by subject, select all tribes and a subject below. If you want to search by tribe only, that is the default selection, so click on a tribe and all of the imagery will be displayed for you. To start a new search, click the new search button and the search tools will be reset for your new query. The imagery is quite improved. Click on the thumbnails to see a much larger and more detailed image
If you want to search for information, there are 4 different search tools, each will
have a separate pull-down menu:
- Tribal summaries, containing basic information about the tribes that
Curtis visited, studied, and photographed
- Curtis biographies, taken from The North American Indian
of a select few Native Americans, whom Curtis decided were important enough
to tell their story, specifically outside of the main text
- A pre-selected keyword search that will take you to the place in the
site that contains the keyword (and may require some scrolling on that
specific page to find the highlighted term)
- A group of articles, taken both from “The North American Indian” or prepared by The Curtis Collection. We will be adding to all of this information in the future.
There are some direct links on the home page for contacting us, a history of The
Curtis Collection, help, and a direct link to understand the gravure printing process for which the plates were created.
We hope to continue to be the place where all of your Curtis information is gathered. Please give us feedback for our site and what you may want included and we’ll do our best to comply.
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