Paul Kane (September 3, 1810 – February 20, 1871)[1] 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.

A largely self-educated artist,[2] Paul Kane grew up in York, Upper Canada (now Toronto) and trained himself by copying European masters on a "Grand Tour" study trip through Europe.

The oil paintings he completed in his studio are considered a part of the Canadian heritage, although he often embellished them considerably, departing from the accuracy of his field sketches in favour of more dramatic scenes.

[1][6] In July 1834, he displayed some of his paintings in the first (and only) exhibition of The Society of Artists and Amateurs in Toronto, gaining a favourable review by a local newspaper, The Patriot.

[10] In June 1841, 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.

[12] 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.

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

Arriving at the Sault, he learned that the canoe brigade had already left, so he sailed aboard a freight schooner to Fort William on Thunder Bay.

On June 26 Kane witnessed and participated in one of the last great buffalo hunts, which within a few decades, aided by railroad travel, decimated the animals to near-extinction.

Upon his return he continued by canoe and sailing boats by way of Norway House, Grand Rapids, and The Pas up the Saskatchewan River to Fort Carlton.

On October 6, 1846, 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, 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.

He 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.

He 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.

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 (today Tacoma) and then by canoe again to Fort Victoria.

Kane continued with one guide by horseback through the Grande Coulée 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.

As the canoes that should have been awaiting them had already left, they were forced to set out on snowshoes and with a dog sled to Fort Assiniboine, where they arrived after much hardship and without food two weeks later.

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

[19] The politician George William Allan took note of the artist and became his most important patron, commissioning one hundred oil paintings for the price of $20,000 in 1852.

[19] The bulk of 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.

Of his early portraits done at York or Cobourg before his travels, Harper writes, "[they] are primitive in approach but have a direct appeal and a warm colouring that make them attractive".

The field sketches are a valuable resource for ethnologists, but the oil paintings, while still truthful in the individual details of Native American lifestyle, are often unfaithful to geographic, historic, or ethnographic settings in their overall compositions.

He 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.

Already in 1877, Nicholas Flood Davin commented on this discrepancy, stating that "the Indian horses are Greek horses, the hills have much of the colour and form of those of [...] the early European landscape painters, ..." And Lawrence Johnstone Burpee added in his introduction to the 1925 reprint of Kane's travel book that the sketches were "truer interpretations of the wild western life" and had "in some respects a higher value as art".

[22] Twentieth century and later art theory is less judging than Burpee but agrees insofar as Kane's field sketches are generally considered more accurate and authentic.

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

His 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.

He 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.

[21] Through his sketches and paintings, and later also his book, the public at large in Upper and Lower Canada for the first time caught a glimpse of the peoples and their lifestyles in this vast and barely known territory.

His idealized oil paintings and the similarly transformed travel notes that became his book were both a factor in the establishment and spreading of the perception of the North American indigenous people as noble savages, contrary to what the artist had intended.