The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 19, 2025

Horizontally oriented muted gold-toned hazy photograph of people riding on horseback away from us through sparse, spindly brush towards towering dark mountains. The riders make a single-file line vertically down the center of the photograph with another single rider to their and our left. The figures are so hazy, only dark cloaks wrapping round their shoulders are discernable.

The Vanishing Race

1904

Edward S. Curtis

(American, 1868–1952)
America
orotone in original Curtis Studio frame
Image: 27.8 x 35.5 cm (10 15/16 x 14 in.); Paper: 27.8 x 35.5 cm (10 15/16 x 14 in.); Framed: 40 x 47.5 cm (15 3/4 x 18 11/16 in.)
Gift of Diann G. Mann and Thomas A. Mann 2019.27
Location: Not on view

Did You Know?

This image is the frontispiece of Edward Curtis’s multivolume study of The North American Indian.

Description

Curtis wrote that this scene of Navajo riding off into the distance showed “that the Indians as a race, already shorn in their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future.” The artist’s signature image is produced here as an orotone, a positive gelatin silver print on glass that has been backed with gold pigment or leaf.
  • Daniel Wolf, Inc., New York, NY
    1983-2019
    Thomas A. and Diann G. Mann, Palm Beach Gardens, FL
    March 4, 2019
    the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • Joseph Epes Brown, The North American Indian, Aperture, New York, 1972, p. 95
    Curtis, Edward S., and Christopher Cardozo. Native Nations: First Americans As Seen by Edward S. Curtis. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. p. 123
    Curtis, Edward S., and Christopher Cardozo. Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. p. 188
    Curtis, Edward S., Frederick Webb Hodge, Theodore Roosevelt, J. Pierpont Morgan, and Christopher Cardozo. The North American Indian: Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of the United States and Alaska. 2017. Portfolio I, pl. 1
    Christie, Manson & Woods International Inc. An American Journey: The Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Collection of Photographic Masterworks. 2018.
  • {{cite web|title=The Vanishing Race|url=false|author=Edward S. Curtis|year=1904|access-date=19 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2019.27