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Paul Kane (September 3, 1810 – February 20, 1871) was an Irish-born Canadian painter, famous for his paintings of First Nations peoples in the Canadian West and other Native Americans in the Columbia District.
A largely self-educated artist, 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. He undertook two voyages through the Canadian northwest in 1845 and from 1846 to 1848. The first trip took him from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie and back. Having secured the support of the Hudson's Bay Company, he set out on a second, much longer voyage from Toronto across the Rocky Mountains to Fort Vancouver (present-day Vancouver, Washington) and Fort Victoria (present day Victoria, British Columbia).
On both trips Kane sketched and painted First Nations and Métis peoples. Upon his return to Toronto, he produced more than one hundred oil paintings from these sketches. 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. Kane's work followed the tenets of salvage ethnography.Works
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 rest are an unknown number of paintings from his time as an itinerant portraitist in the United States, plus a number of copies of classic paintings he did while in Europe.
Kane's fame rests in his depictions of Native American life. His field sketches were done in pencil, watercolour, or oil on paper. He also brought back from his trips a collection of various artefacts such as masks, pipe stems, and other handicrafts.  Together, these formed the basis for his later studio work. He drew on this pool of impressions for his large oil canvases, in which he typically combined or reinterpreted them to create new compositions. 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.
One well-known example of this process is 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. Another example of how Kane elaborated his sketches can be seen in his painting Indian encampment on Lake Huron, which is based on a sketch taken in summer 1845 during his first trip to Sault Ste. Marie. The painting has a distinct romantic flair accentuated by the lighting and the dramatic clouds, while the scene of the camp life depicted is reminiscent of a European idealized rural peasant scene.
Indeed, Kane often created completely fictitious scenes from several sketches for his oil paintings. His oil canvas of Mount St. Helens erupting shows a major and dramatic volcanic eruption, but from his travel diary and the field sketches he made, it is evident that the mountain had only been smoking gently at the time of Kane's visit. (It had, however, erupted three years earlier.) In other paintings he combined river sketches taken at different times and places into one painting, creating an artificial landscape that does not exist in reality. His 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.
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