65 Facts About Paul Kane

Paul Kane was an Irish-born Canadian painter whose paintings and especially field sketches were known as one of the first visual documents of Western indigenous life.

Paul Kane undertook two voyages through the Canadian northwest in 1845 and from 1846 to 1848.

On both trips Kane sketched and painted First Nations and Metis peoples.

Paul Kane was born in Mallow, County Cork in Ireland, the fifth child of the eight children of Michael Paul Kane and Frances Loach.

Sometime between 1819 and 1822, when Paul Kane was around ten, they immigrated to Upper Canada and settled in York.

Not much is known about Paul Kane's youth in York, which at that time was a small settlement of a few thousand people.

Paul Kane went to school at Upper Canada College, and then received some training in painting by an art teacher named Thomas Drury at the Upper Canada College around 1830.

Paul Kane began a career as a sign and furniture painter at York until he moved to Cobourg, Ontario, in 1834.

Paul Kane may have taken up a job in the furniture factory of Freeman Schermerhorn Clench, the father of Harriet Clench who Kane married in 1853.

In 1836 Paul Kane moved to Detroit, Michigan, where the American artist James Bowman was living.

Bowman had persuaded Paul Kane that studying art in Europe was a necessity for an aspiring painter, and they had planned to travel to Europe together, along with Samuel Bell Waugh.

In June 1841, Paul Kane left America, sailing from New Orleans aboard a ship bound for Marseilles in France, arriving there about three months later, and immediately made out for Italy.

Paul Kane hiked much of this journey, travelling on foot from Rome to Naples, as well as the Brenner Pass in Switzerland.

Paul Kane found the argument compelling and decided to similarly document Canadian First Nations.

Paul Kane returned in early 1843 to Mobile, Alabama, where he set up a studio and worked as a portrait painter until he had paid back the money borrowed for his voyage to Europe.

Paul Kane returned to Toronto late 1844 or early 1845 and immediately began preparing for his journey west.

Paul Kane set out on his own on June 17,1845, travelling along the northern shores of the Lake Huron, moving through Saugeen land.

Paul Kane had intended to travel further west, but John Ballenden, the local Chief Trader for the Hudson's Bay Company stationed at Sault Ste.

Paul Kane returned to Toronto for the winter, elaborating his field sketches to oil canvases, and in spring of the next year, he went to the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company at Lachine and asked company governor George Simpson for support for his travel plans.

Paul Kane granted Kane passage on company canoes only as far as Lake Winnipeg, with the promise of full passage if the artist did well until then.

On May 9,1846, Paul Kane departed by steamboat from Toronto with the intent to join a canoe brigade from Lachine at Sault Ste.

On October 6,1846, Paul Kane left Edmonton for Fort Assiniboine, where he again embarked with a canoe brigade up the Athabasca River to Jasper's House, arriving on November 3.

Finally, Paul Kane arrived on December 18,1846, at Fort Vancouver, the main trading post and headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Oregon Territory.

Paul Kane stayed there over winter, sketching among and studying the Chinookan and other tribes in the vicinity and making several excursions, including a longer one of three weeks through the Willamette Valley.

Paul Kane enjoyed the social life at Fort Vancouver, which at that time was being visited by the British ship Modeste, and became friends with Peter Skene Ogden.

On March 25,1847, Paul Kane set out by canoe to Fort Victoria, which had been founded shortly before to become the new company headquarters, as the operations at Fort Vancouver were to be wound down and relocated following the conclusion of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which fixed the continental border between Canada and the United States west of the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel north.

Paul Kane went up the Cowlitz River and stayed for a week among the tribes living there in the vicinity of Mount St Helens before continuing on horseback to Nisqually and then by canoe again to Fort Victoria.

Paul Kane's painting of Mount St Helens in eruption at night in 1847 which is in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was the only known image of an active Cascade volcano until the eruption of Lassen Peak in California in 1914.

Paul Kane stayed for two months in that area, traveling and sketching among the Native Americans on Vancouver Island and around the Juan de Fuca Strait and the Strait of Georgia.

Paul Kane returned to Fort Vancouver in mid-June, from where he departed to return east on July 1,1847.

Paul Kane went with Marcus Whitman to visit the Cayuse living in the area and happened to draw a portrait of Tomahas, the man who would later be named as Whitman's murderer.

Paul Kane continued with one guide by horseback through the Grande Coulee to Fort Colvile, where he stayed for six weeks, sketching and painting the natives who had set up a fishing camp below Kettle Falls at this time of the salmon run.

On September 22,1847, Paul Kane assumed command of a canoe brigade up the Columbia River and arrived on October 10 at Boat Encampment.

Paul Kane passed the time at the fort with buffalo hunting, and sketched among the Cree living in the vicinity.

On May 25,1848, Paul Kane left Fort Edmonton, travelling with a large party of 23 boats and 130 people bound for York Factory, led by John Edward Harriott.

On that occasion Paul Kane met the Blackfoot chief Big Snake.

Paul Kane noted in his book on this last leg of his journey: "the greatest hardship that I had to endure [now] was the difficulty in trying to sleep in a civilized bed".

Paul Kane went West once more when he was hired by a British party in 1849 as a guide and interpreter, but they went only as far as the Red River Colony.

In 1853, Paul Kane married Harriet Clench, the daughter of his former employer at Cobourg.

Until 1857, Paul Kane fulfilled his commissions: more than 120 oil canvases for Allan, the Parliament, and Simpson.

Paul Kane's works were shown at the World's Fair at Paris in 1855, where they were reviewed very positively, and some of them were sent to Buckingham Palace in 1858 for consideration by Queen Victoria.

Paul Kane had dedicated the book to Allan, which upset Simpson so that he broke off his relations with Paul Kane.

Paul Kane's eyesight was failing rapidly in the 1860s and forced him to abandon painting altogether.

Frederick Arthur Verner, who had been inspired by Paul Kane and was an artist of "western" scenes, became an acquaintance and friend.

Paul Kane died unexpectedly one winter morning in 1871 in his home, just having returned from his daily walk.

Paul Kane is buried at the St James Cemetery in Toronto.

The bulk of Paul Kane's oeuvre is the more than 700 sketches he made during his two voyages to the west and the more than one hundred oil canvases he later elaborated from them in his studio in Toronto.

Paul Kane's fame rests in his depictions of Native American life.

Paul Kane brought back from his trips a collection of various artefacts such as masks, pipe stems, and other handicrafts.

Paul Kane drew on this pool of impressions for his large oil canvases, in which he typically combined or reinterpreted them to create new compositions.

One well-known example of this process is Paul Kane's painting Flathead woman and child, in which he combined a sketch of a Chinookan baby having its head flattened by being strapped to a cradle board with a later field portrait of a Cowlitz woman living in a different region.

Indeed, Paul Kane often created completely fictitious scenes from several sketches for his oil paintings.

Paul Kane's painting of The Death of Big Snake shows an entirely imaginary scene: the Blackfoot chief Omoxesisixany died only in 1858, more than two years after the painting was completed.

Paul Kane's models were classic European paintings but Kane had plain economic reasons for composing his oil paintings in the more mannered style of the European art tradition.

Paul Kane wanted and had to sell his paintings to make a living, and he knew his clientele well enough: his patrons were unlikely to decorate their homes with unadorned copies in oil of his field sketches; they demanded something more presentable and closer to the generally Eurocentric expectations of the time.

Paul Kane's embellishment is evident in his painting Assiniboine hunting buffalo, one of the twelve done for the parliament.

Paul Kane is generally considered a classic and one of the most important Canadian painters.

Paul Kane's travel report, published originally in London in 1859, was a great success already in its time and has been reprinted several times in the twentieth century.

In 1986 Dawkins criticized Paul Kane's work based mainly on this travel account, but on the "European" nature of his oil paintings, as showing the imperialistic or even racist tendencies of the artist.

Paul Kane's travels inspired others to similar journeys, and a very direct artistic influence is evident in the case of F A Verner, whose mentor Kane became in his later years.

Paul Kane was the most prominent painter in Upper Canada in his time.

Paul Kane frequently entered his paintings at art exhibitions and won numerous prizes for his works.

Paul Kane dominated the scene throughout the 1850s, even to the point where an art jury all but presented their excuses when they did not award him the prize in the category for historical paintings at the annual exhibition of the Upper Canada Agricultural Society in 1852.

Paul Kane was one of the first, if not the first, tourist to travel across the Canadian west and the Pacific north-west.

In 1937 Paul Kane was declared a National Historic Person, and a plaque to commemorate him was dedicated in Rocky Mountain House in 1952.