What These Plates Are Worth
How the Camp Keeper Arrives at a Price
People ask how I price a copper plate. It’s a fair question. There’s no catalog. No Blue Book. No comparable market to point to. These are one-of-a-kind artifacts from a project that ended a century ago, and most of the world doesn’t know they exist.
So how do you price something like that?
You sell them for forty-four years.
My partner and I have placed more than five hundred and fifty copper plates since 1982 — in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Seattle Art Museum, tribal nations reclaiming images of their own ancestors, and with private collectors who understood what they were holding. Forty-four years of transactions with dealers, institutions, and collectors are the basis for every price on this site.
We use the median of those transactions as a starting point. Not the average — a few extraordinary plates pull that number into territory most plates will never reach. The median tells us where the market actually lives for the plates we’re offering now.
From there, two things move the price: what region the image comes from and what kind of image it is. A named Plains warrior portrait has always commanded more than a landscape. A Southwestern village scene sits in a different place than an architectural study. This isn’t theory. It’s what forty-four years of buyers have told us with their checkbooks.
Lastly, based on my research of public auctions, discussions with Curtis dealers, and our sales ledger, I found that copper plates sell for more than any other instance of a Curtis image, except in a few rare and unusual circumstances.
Every plate on this site is priced within that framework. If you’d like to understand how we arrived at a specific number, call me. I’ll walk you through it. That’s what the Camp Keeper is for.
The market has been building this price list for forty-four years. I just read it carefully.