Beauty of the Week: “Indian Camp on Lake Huron” by Paul Kane

In 1845, an unknown painter set out on a trip to the wilderness of Canada. He took horseback excursions to hunt buffalo in Sioux lands, took long canoe rides – sometimes alone – and rode through snowstorms for weeks.

Paul Kane (1810 – 1871) was on a mission to rescue the customs and characteristics of the original peoples which were disappearing as progress went hand in hand with the advance of railways and trade, and he l did in a very particular way passing through a romantic sieve what he observed, as happens in Indian Camp on Lake Huronan oil painting made between 1848 and 1850 which recovers this first experience as an explorer and which transforms him into a painter of history.

Behind all historical painting, there is a fiction. An approach that seeks to highlight a figure or give drama to a certain moment, as well as a subjective cut of the artist and the values ​​of an era.

The genre, perhaps one of the founders of painting, was born to present stories from the Bible, which is why from the start it had its connotation of propaganda. Even when it extended to ancient history, such as Greek or Roman history, it was based on literary accounts, and here again the hand of the artist and the desire of the sponsor played a preponderant role.

Consider a simple example that shows how a simple decision by the artist can have a significant influence on subsequent works and, over time, become a convention that spans centuries. Think of the Roman salute, in which the arm is raised showing the palm of the hand which, in a more exaggerated way, ended up becoming the fascist salute and today inseparable from Nazism.

Is there any evidence that the ancient Romans saluted this way? So far, none, but it took two important artists to capture it in their work for the idea to catch on in the imagination. We are talking about Jacques-Louis David con The Oath of the Horatii (1784) yes Jean-Leon Gerome con Hello Caesar! Those who are about to die salute you (1859).

Before being appropriated by fascism, the salute was very popular all over the world, it was even the one made by athletes at the Olympic Games and, until 1942, in the United States they saluted their flag in this way during the intonation of the anthem.

Paul Kane He is not an artist mentioned in the art history books, at least not outside of Canada or the United States, where he developed his artistic work and where most of his work resides. work. Of course, because of these things that everything must be labeled, he is considered a painter of history, but above all of ethnography.

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Kane was born in Ireland and moved to Canada around the age of 10, settling in York, present-day Toronto, when it was a rather inhospitable colony of a few thousand people. It has been possible to reconstruct that he had an artistic training in his youth and that he came to present paintings in the only exhibition organized by the Society of Artists and Hobbyists in Toronto. Additionally, he survived by painting signs and embellishing furniture at a local factory and even some portraits of prominent figures, but then began an itinerant life as a portrait painter in the New Orleans area.

In 1841 he left the United States for Marseilles, France, and later he visited Italy, from Rome to Naples on foot, Switzerland, Paris and London working in different trades and doing more portraits on demand. It is believed that it was in the English capital that he met George Catlina brilliant painter who captured the essence of First Nations in the United States and who, at the time, was presenting a book in town.

Catlin and Kane could fall into the category of so-called itinerant painters, those men who entered uncharted territory and then brought their experiences to canvas, text, or both. In this part of the world there were also many, being among the best known Emeric Essex Vidal, Leon Palliere, Hippolyte Bacle there Johann Moritz Rugendas.

Indeed, between 1852 and 1858, Catlin made three trips through South America. In the first, he entered the Pacific and reached the Atlantic through the Strait of Magellan and ended up in the coastal region of Argentina. He also visited parts of Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Venezuela. His experience and drawings can be found at Last walks among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes (1868) y My life among the Indians (1909).

The meeting with Catlin plus that spirit of explorer that Kane had already convinced to follow the American’s walks to search the native towns before they disappeared. Thus, back in America, he must continue as a portrait painter to repay the loans that allow him to reach Europe and already in 1845 he begins his work of portrait of the Canadian First Nations.

He began in the Northwest, along the shores of Lake Huron, but the hardships and dangers of the solitary traveler led him to seek the support of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which held a monopoly on the sale of furs and a certain number of stalls on the territory. , where the artist made the sketches which he later produced on canvas at his home in Toronto until 1848.

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During these travels, Kane drew and painted not only the First Nations, but also the Métis, a community of mixed-race ancestry resulting from the unions of First Nations women with British and French-Canadian Company employees.

After a series of successful exhibitions in Toronto, he obtained a patron who commissioned him 100 oil paintings and also received commissions from Parliament for 12 historical paintings, which were successfully presented at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1855 and some later went to Buckingham. Palace for Queen Victoria to enjoy.

An artist’s wanderings between North American Indians from Canada to Vancouver Island and Oregon through Hudson’s Bay Company territory and back (An artist’s wanderings among the North American Indians from Canada to Vancouver Island and Oregon through Hudson’s Bay Company territory and back) was his memoir, published in London in 1859, illustrated with numerous lithographs of his sketches and paintings, which was translated into several languages.

Kane’s work is part of Canadian heritage and continues to be studied, although there is already an agreement that many licenses have been taken to give them a dramatic charge. His field sketches, with which he later made his paintings in his studio, are rich material for ethnologists, because the paintings are very precise in capturing the way of life of the original peoples, some details, but not so much in their geographical and historical contexts.

It is therefore with Flat-headed woman with her son (1848) where he collects a baby Chinookan lying on a cradle board to flatten his skull and in which he places a Cowlitz woman, from another region, as a mother.

returning to Indian Camp on Lake Huron, is revealed the need to enter into the romantic, idealized style, in order to satisfy its buyers by following what was happening in Europe. In this way, the artist created paintings drawn from reality but with commercially oriented aesthetic decisions.

Currently, his works can be seen in three spaces: the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, while most of his sketches, at the Stark Museum of Art in Texas.

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