Edward S. Curtis

Collection of Richard and Julie Lord

By descent to the present owners

Florence Curtis Graybill and Victor Boesen, Edward Sherriff Curtis: Visions of a Vanishing Race (Boston, 1976), p. 15

Barbara A. Davis, Edward S. Curtis: The Life and Times of a Shadow Catcher (San Francisco, 1985), p. 32

Christopher Cardozo, ed., Native Nations: First Americans as seen by Edward S. Curtis (Boston, 1993), p. 33

Laurie Lawlor, Shadow Catcher, the Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis (New York, 1994), p. 52

Edward S. Curtis: The North American Indian, The Complete Portfolios (Köln, 1997), p. 272

Christopher Cardozo, ed., Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian (New York, 2000), p. 30

The Plains Indian Photographs of Edward S. Curtis (Lincoln, 2001), pl. 33

The Three Chiefs – Piegan is a defining image from Edward Curtis’s extensive oeuvre.  Made in the summer of 1900 during a trip to Montana with noted ethnographer George Bird Grinnell, this portrait of Blackfoot tribal leaders predates—and in many ways inspired—Curtis’s The North American Indian: Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of United States and Alaska, a vast 20-volume pictorial document published between 1907 and 1930 of Native American cultures prior to assimilation. Curtis included The Three Chiefs – Piegan as plate 209 in volume 6 of The North American Indian, which focused on The Piegan, The Cheyenne, and The Arapaho, covering each tribe’s histories, customs, and mythologies. 

Boldly signed and in its original Arts and Crafts-style oak frame, the commanding photograph offered here is believed to be the largest print of the image to come to market in more than two decades.