Truthand Liesin Paul Kane’s Literary and Artistic Work
J. Russell Harper rightly describes Paul Kane as “[t]he most famous of all Canadian artist-explorers” (Encyclopedia, par. 1). In fact, Kane’s contribution to the study of Native customs and lifestyles has been invaluable, and to this day “[e]thnologists find a wealth of information” in his works (Harper, Dictionary, par. 16). But Kane’s production was not exempt from prejudice and stereotypes. After a short biography of the artist, this essay will address the mixed attitudes towards Natives that can be found in Kane’s travel account and in his artistic work.
Biography
Paul Kane was born in Ireland in 1810. Nine years later, his parents immigrated to York (Toronto). Around 1830, Kane decided to become a professional artist. After working as a portraitist and furniture painter in the United States for 11 years, he realized one of his dreams: traveling to Europe in order to study the works of the old masters. After spending some time in France and Italy, Kane moved to London where he met George Catlin, an American artist who had become famous for his paintings of North American Indians. Catlin’s work produced such on strong impression on Kane that when he returned to Toronto, in 1845, he decided to travel to the West Coast in order to record Native life. He received technical and financial support from Sir George Simpson, the superintendent of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who allowed him to travel with the HBC brigades and stop at company posts. Thus began a long journey that took Kane as far as Vancouver Island and Oregon. When the artist finally returned to Toronto in 1848, he had accumulated some 700 sketches of the landscapes, people, and artefacts of the Canadian West (Harper, Dictionary).
Travel Account
During his travels, Kane jotted down brief notes in a pocket notebook. These notes were later transcribed, expanded, and embellished to become, in Eaton’s words, “a lengthy and very popular Victorian travel book, replete with the literary conventions and social prejudices of the time” (6). The account, titled Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver Island and Oregon through the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territory and Back Again, was published in 1859 under “pressure from influential persons,” including Kane’s patron, Sir George Simpson (Harper, Dictionary, 27). The book reveals mixed feelings towards the Natives.
On the one hand, many phrases attest to a belief in the cultural inferiority of Natives, who are sometimes regarded as barely human. Examples can be found very easily throughout Kane’s book, with references to the Native as an “untutored savage” (33), “one of the most dangerous animals in existence” (35), leading a “wild” life full of “vicissitudes” (81). In some instances, Kane does not seem to have any respect at all for Natives. This is revealed in an especially shocking sentence where he tells about replacing one of his Native guides: “One of my Indians falling sick here, I procured another Indian….” (Kane 201). Here, Native men are depicted as mere commodities that are interchangeable and can be disposed of when they are no longer useful.Apparently, describing Natives as animals was not enough: they had to be reduced to objects.
But on the other hand, other excerpts suggest a more open mind that is not as quick in dismissing Natives as uncivilized savages. The most striking one is certainly the one about cannibalism. After telling that some Natives have been known to eat their own relatives for want of food, Kane contrasts the horror of the fact with the following opinion:
I do not think that any Indian, at least none that I have ever seen, would eat his fellow-creature, except under the influence of starvation; nor do I think that there is any tribe of Indians on the North American continent to whom the word “cannibal” can be properly applied. (61)
Coming from a nineteenth-century European male, this is a surprisingly positive view.
Was this discrepancy in the treatment of Natives present in Kane’s mind, or did it arise in the editorial process? Any answer to this question would be mere speculation: as Kane’s original travel notes are not widely available, the published book cannot be compared with any other material.
Field Sketches and Studio Paintings
Still, we do have access to other things that can be compared: Kane’s field sketches, which he drew quickly as he was traveling, and his large and better-known oil paintings, which he created in hisToronto studio many years afterwards. Whereas the former display an impressive amount of detail and were drawn with documentary precision, the latter were “[c]arefully composed and executed in accordance with nineteenth-century standards of taste” (Eaton 5). And these standards were not always consistent with documentary realism. For example, Kane readily paints Natives hunting buffalo with bows and arrows whereas his written account of the hunt reveals that the actual weapons being used were guns.
According to Ann Davis and Robert Thacker, quoted by Eaton, the discrepancy between the sketches and the oil paintings can be explained by the different functions that the works served in Kane’s mind:
Kane was the recorder in the field and the artist in the studio. He seemed content to concentrate on the mirror—to “imitate”—when sketching, but felt the need to be a lamp—to “create”—when working up his canvases. (ix)
In other words, sketches had to be primarily accurate whereas paintings had to be primarily aesthetically pleasing. Jonathan Raban has a different theory, one that challenges the very notion that Kane’s paintings are about the Canadian West:
Kane's journey is the real subject; his Pacific Northwest is an adequately wild backdrop for a sequence of pictures in which one's attention instinctively fastens less on the land than on the personality of the painter. (43)
The paintings, as opposed to the very detailed and realistic sketches, would then be similar to the published travel account: more entertaining than didactic, more focused on Kane’s adventures than on the people he met.
In conclusion, it is important to recall that although Paul Kane’s work has often been analyzed (and criticized) as anthropological work, Kane was not an anthropologist: he was a professional artist who made a living by painting the works that people commissioned and abiding by the conventions of his time. Only by taking these factors into consideration can one truly appreciate how impressive Kane’s travel account and field sketches are. They may not be perfectly accurate, they may not be exempt from bias, but they display a sincere will to be fair to Natives and describe their customs and lifestyles in great detail. And by the standards of nineteenth-century amateur anthropology, this is certainly a remarkable achievement.
Works Cited
Eaton, Diane, and Sheila Urbanek. Paul Kane’s Great Nor-West.Vancouver: UBC Press,
1995. ebrary. U de Sherbrooke Library, QC. 1 Nov. 2008.
Harper, J. Russell. “Kane, Paul.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. 2000.
U of Toronto/Université Laval. 1 Nov. 2008. <
---. “Kane, Paul.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. 2008. 1 Nov. 2008.
<http.//
Kane, Paul. Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America from Canada to
Vancouver Island and Oregon through the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territory and
Back Again. London: Longman, 1859. Early Canadiana Online. U de Sherbrooke
Library, QC. 1 Nov. 2008. <
ECO/mtq?doc=35931&language=fr>.
Raban, Jonathan. “Battleground of the Eye.”The Atlantic Monthly.Mar.2001:
40-52.General Interest Module.ProQuest.U de Sherbrooke Library, QC.
1 Nov. 2008.<