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From the twentieth and final portfolio of Edward S. Curtis\'s The North American Indian, the 1930 Alaska installment that closed the thirty-year project. This large folio photogravure shows a reindeer herd massed on the Bering Sea shore of Nunivak Island, a thicket of antlers against flat water and open sky, photographed on Curtis\'s last major field expedition.
On that 1927 trip, Curtis, his daughter Beth and writer Stewart Eastwood took a small boat into the Bering Sea and worked Nunivak, King Island, Little Diomede and the Seward Peninsula through rough weather to finish the survey. Curtis wrote warmly of Nunivak, home of the Nuniwarmiut, the Cup\'ig-speaking people of the island. Reindeer were introduced to Nunivak around 1920 under the federal reindeer program begun in the 1890s, and by the time Curtis arrived the herd was central to the island\'s economy.
Volume and Portfolio XX appeared in 1930, at the start of the Depression, when subscriptions had dwindled to their lowest. Material from this final installment is the scarcest of the publication.
A vintage impression from the original 1907 to 1930 publication, printed by the Suffolk Engraving Company of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on warm ivory Japon vellum, one of the three papers used for original subscriber sets. Full margins with a crisp intaglio plate mark. Not a 1970s restrike; those were printed on modern papers such as Arches and Rives BFK.
Provenance: the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection. Cardozo (1948 to 2021) was the leading Curtis collector, dealer and scholar of his generation and the author of Sacred Legacy. The sheet keeps its Cardozo inventory number in pencil on the verso, with the collection\'s cataloging label.
Sheet 22 x 18 in. Unframed and ready to frame.
