Paul Kane, the Artist: Wilderness to Studio

Paul Kane’s evocative paintings of mid-19th-century Canada have become a treasured part of Canada’s heritage. The Royal Ontario Museum holds the world’s largest collection of Kane’s art– 100 oil paintings and 373 sketches in graphite and watercolour. In the mid-1800s, Kane journeyed across Canada by canoe, bateau, horseback, dog sled, and snowshoes–from southern Ontario to the Pacific coast–driven by a passion to produce a visual record of Native peoples, their customs, and artifacts. His sketches in the wilderness reflect what he saw and they became the basis for the oil paintings he later completed in his studio. This is the first time that the ROM’s Kane sketches and paintings have been brought together in a beautiful, authoritative, and popular work. Every painting has been colour-matched to the original under 5500K Verda-Ray Criticolor lighting to ensure colour accuracy. Lavishly illustrated, this coffee table volume will attract the general-reader interest, the art historian, the connoisseur of art, the anthropologist, and all those interested in the culture of Aboriginal peoples. Bound in a durable cloth to serve library and other reference use. Printed and bound in Canada.