Kane (1859)
Kane, Paul (1810-1871). Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America [...]. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859.
Born in 1810 in Ireland, Paul Kane emigrated to York (Toronto) with his parents at the age of about eight or nine. He supposedly learned the rudiments of his art with Thomas Drury, a local painter and teacher at Upper Canada College. In the early 1830s Kane worked as a painter-decorator in furniture factories in York and Cobourg, while painting portraits of local citizens. From 1836 to 1841 he worked as an itinerant portrait painter in different cities in the central United States.
In order to perfect his art, Kane then stayed in Italy and England from 1841 to 1843. In London he made the acquaintance of the American artist George Catlin who was exhibiting his portraits of Indians of the Prairies and Rocky Mountain region. Convinced that the Indians of North America would soon be extinct, Catlin had set himself the task of recording their features for posterity. Kane endorsed his theory and decided to do in Canada what Catlin was doing in the United States.
From 1845 to 1848 Kane visited the Canadian West including Vancouver Island, making more than 700 sketches, some of them carefully executed watercolours, others simple pencil sketches. He then spent the rest of his life painting in Toronto, using his sketches to produce his paintings of the life and mores of the Indians of the West. During the same period other artists also visited the West, but Kane's work is far superior to all the others, both in its scope and in the richness and quality of its execution.
During the 1850s Kane wrote a book about his travels in 1845-1848, based on the journal he had kept. The book appeared in 1859, embellished by many lithographs and vignettes taken from his sketches and paintings.
Alphabetical Navigation
|
Chronological Navigation
|
|
