Paul Kane

Paul Kane: The Recorder and the Embellisher

In October 1842, an Irish-born sign painter from Toronto walked into a London exhibition of George Catlin's Indian gallery and came out with a career. Catlin's argument — that Indigenous North America was vanishing and had to be documented before it went — gave Paul Kane a purpose that a life spent decorating furniture had not. Four years later he was crossing the Rockies with the Hudson's Bay Company. He came back with more than 700 sketches and then spent the rest of his working life turning them into something considerably less truthful.

Mallow to York

He was born on 3 September 1810, probably at Mallow in County Cork, the son of Michael Kane — a soldier of the Royal Horse Artillery from Lancashire, described elsewhere as a corporal — and Frances Loach of Cork. The family emigrated to York, Upper Canada, the future Toronto, around 1819. His father set up as a wine and spirits merchant.

Kane's training was thin and practical. Around 1830 he took instruction from Thomas Drury, a painter attached to Upper Canada College. He worked as a sign and furniture painter in York, moved to Cobourg in 1834 for what was probably work in Freeman Schermerhorn Clench's furniture factory, and from 1836 made a living as an itinerant portraitist across the American interior — Detroit, St Louis, Mobile, New Orleans.

Europe

In June 1841 he sailed from New Orleans to Marseille and spent roughly two years working through Italy, Switzerland, Paris and London, studying at Roman academies and copying old masters. It was the standard self-improvement circuit for a colonial painter, and it gave him the European compositional vocabulary that would later be both the making and the undoing of his canvases. Then came Catlin.

The Journeys

Back in Toronto by early 1845, Kane made a first trip that summer from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie, sketching First Nations and Métis subjects. It was a rehearsal. Securing the patronage of Governor George Simpson and the permission of the Hudson's Bay Company, he set out in the spring of 1846 on a journey that took him across the Rockies to Fort Vancouver and Fort Victoria and back, returning in October 1848.

He travelled through what is now Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and the Canadian northwest, sketching constantly: portraits, encampments, ceremonies, landscapes. The count is usually given as more than 700 sketches, and they constitute among the earliest visual records of life in the northwest before European settlement.

The Company was the reason any of it was possible. Its posts, canoes, brigades and interpreters formed the only infrastructure by which a painter could cross the continent and come back alive, and Simpson's endorsement bought Kane access to communities that would otherwise have had no reason to admit him. He also recorded landscape where it arrested him — his painting of Mount St Helens, then an active volcano, is among the works the Royal Ontario Museum holds.

The Studio

Then the second career began. Back in Toronto, Kane converted the field material into more than 100 oil paintings. In 1852 the politician George William Allan commissioned one hundred canvases for $20,000, which secured Kane financially and professionally; Parliament commissioned a further twelve for £500, delivered late in 1856.

The oils are not the sketches. Kane recombined studies made months and hundreds of miles apart into single composite scenes, added drama, and imposed European picturesque conventions on subjects that had not looked like that. Scholarship has settled on a formulation that is both fair and damning: Kane was the recorder in the field and the artist in the studio. The paintings sold. The sketches are the evidence.

Wanderings

In 1859 Longman, Brown, Green published *The Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver's Island and Oregon through the Hudson's Bay Company's Territory and Back Again*. It was a success — French, Danish and German editions had appeared by 1863 — and he also published in the *Canadian Journal*.

His eyesight failed rapidly through the 1860s, forcing him to stop painting and close the studio. He died unexpectedly in Toronto on 20 February 1871 and is buried in St James Cemetery.

Why Paul Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the case is for craft, endurance and timing rather than for genius, and that his best work was made under conditions that left no room for the thing he was actually best at.

What he possessed in the field was speed and accuracy — the ability to take a likeness quickly, in difficult circumstances, among people with no particular reason to sit for him, and to record dress, implement and ceremony precisely enough that ethnographers still use the results. Doing that across two and a half years and thousands of miles, by canoe and horse, required hardiness at least as much as artistic gift. His conceptual contribution was borrowed: the salvage-ethnography premise was Catlin's, and Kane applied it to British North America.

The counter-case is that his ambition ran the other way. Kane wanted to be a studio painter in the European grand manner, and the moment he had the money to do it, he degraded his own best material — merging separate sketches into fictitious scenes, adding drama for the market, dressing observed people in borrowed conventions. Canadian scholarship treats the oils with real scepticism about their documentary value. His most valuable work, the portrait of John Henry Lefroy, fetched C$5,062,500 in 2002 — a record for Canadian art, and a fact about the market rather than about genius. What survives of Kane is a body of field sketches of the first importance, made by a competent painter with an exceptional constitution and one very good idea he got from somebody else.

Legacy

The collections tell the story. The Allan commission went to the Royal Ontario Museum in 1912; the Parliament canvases are in the National Gallery of Canada; 229 of the sketches are at the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas; the Lefroy portrait is in the Art Gallery of Ontario's Thomson Collection. He was declared a National Historic Person in 1937, and a commemorative plaque was dedicated at Rocky Mountain House in 1952. Modern scholars read him against the grain, using the sketches as evidence and the paintings as a case study in how nineteenth-century Europe preferred to picture the people it was displacing.

Achievements

• Notable work: Flathead woman with child
• Movement: academic art