Paul Kane

Paul Kane (1810-1871), Canadian painter, best known for his paintings of First Nations peoples. One of few Canadian artists to receive national acclaim during his lifetime, Kane became famous for his exploration and art of the Canadian Northwest.

Kane was born in Mallow, Ireland, and in 1819 his family moved to York, Upper Canada (now Toronto, Ontario). He studied art privately with Thomas Drury, art master at Upper Canada College in York. Kane first worked painting signs, portraits, and furniture ornamentation. From 1836 to 1841 he traveled in the United States, spending time in several cities, including Detroit, Michigan, and Mobile, Alabama. In 1841 he went to Italy to study the old masters. On a visit to London, England, Kane met American artist George Catlin and saw his gallery of paintings of American aboriginal peoples. Inspired, Kane returned to Canada in 1845, envisioning his own gallery focused on Canada’s First Nations. He began to travel throughout Canada’s vast wilderness, equipped with a paintbrush and a gun.

Polite and composed, Kane was able to convince First Nations people to sit for portraits. On his journey, he received help from Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had been granted control of much of western Canada. Simpson arranged for Kane to accompany fleets of fur traders travelling to company forts by canoe. In 1846 Kane joined traders at Fort William (now Thunder Bay, Ontario) and travelled with them to Fort Garry (Winnipeg) and Fort Edmonton (Edmonton). From Fort Edmonton, he crossed the Rocky Mountains on horseback. He reached Vancouver and Victoria before returning to Toronto in 1848 with 700 sketches of people and scenery from the west.

The same year that he returned to Toronto, Kane presented a show displaying his sketches and watercolors along with artifacts he had collected. The show, held at Toronto’s city hall, was one of the first one-person exhibitions in Canada. A Toronto lawyer commissioned Kane to produce 100 oil paintings based on his field sketches, and he completed the canvases by 1855 (now in the collection of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum). In 1859 he published an informative account of his travels.