Featured here is Paul Kane’s oil painting, Assiniboine Hunting Buffalo. It is unique because its style is strongly influenced by European art, but of course its subject is strictly American. This combination of ethnic expressions illustrates his own personal history.
Born in Ireland on September 3, 1810, Kane grew up to be a Canadian painter and was most well known for his Native American scenes from the Canadian West and Oregon Country. He taught himself to paint by studying the masters from Europe. He took a study trip to Europe, and when he returned he traveled through northwestern Canada and across the rocky mountains to Oregon Country. He spent his time sketching the people he saw on his travels, depicting their everyday lives, and when he returned to his home in Canada he created more than a hundred dramatized oil paintings from his sketches. He was the most influential painter in Canada in his day, and he inspired many other artists to follow in his footsteps and travel to gain subject matter for their work. His own work served to give others a glimpse into the lives of those whom he painted, lives in a land that went mostly unnoticed and about which people generally knew little. Since he did make his paintings more dramatic than what he had actually observed, he contributed to people’s exaggerated understanding of the savage lifestyle of American Indians. This had not been his intention, and when his sketches were found later they revealed a more accurate representation of those lifestyles.
Pictured below is his The Surveyor: Portrait of Captain John Henry Lefroy.
