Paul Kane

born Mallow, Cork, Ireland, 1810; died Toronto, Ontario, 1871

BiographyBorn in County Cork, Ireland, Paul Kane immigrated to Toronto, Canada, in about 1819. He was mostly self-taught and spent the early part of his career painting portraits in cities in the central United States and Canada, raising money to travel to Europe and further his artistic studies. Kane left for Marseilles in 1841 and eventually made it to London, where he met George Catlin and saw his famous Indian Gallery for the first time. Catlin’s work inspired Kane to create his own Indian Gallery for the Canadian Northwest. He returned to North America and set out on his first expedition in 1845, joining a Hudson’s Bay Company expedition after being introduced to Superintendent Sir George Simpson in 1846. By 1848 Kane had traveled from Toronto to the Pacific Coast and back and had made portraits of a diverse range of Native Americans from the Great Lakes Region to the territories that would become Washington and Oregon. A two-week exhibition of Kane’s sketches was held at the Toronto City Hall upon his return in 1848. The artist traveled west once more to the Red River Colony in 1849, and finally published the journals of his travels as Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America ten years later. Kane died in his hometown of Toronto in 1871.

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