[66] 

 PAUL KANE, THE CANADIAN ARTIST. 



In the earlier numbers of the new series of the Canadian Journal, 

 several papers on various Indian tribes of the North West, from the 

 pea of Paul Kane, attracted considerable attention, as the results of 

 travel and personal observation in the remote Hudson's Bay Territory, 

 and beyond the Eocky Mountains. Their author had long been known 

 in Canada as a self-taught artist of great promise, who had devoted 

 himself to the study of the native Indian tribes of British North 

 America; and his contributions to this journal were the first published 

 results of explorations, the fruits of which were afterwards set forth in 

 more comprehensive form in his " Wanderings of an Artist among the 

 Indians of North America," published by Messrs. Longman & Co., of 

 London, in 1859. 



The recent death of Mr. Kane invites some special notice of him in 

 tbis journal, to which he was for some time a valued contributor. His 

 father, Mr. Michael Kane, was originally in the British Army, and 

 served latterly, we believe, in the small force which accompanied 

 Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe, when he removed to the selected site of 

 the future capital of Western Canada, in 1794. On his leaving the 

 army, he settled in the newly founded city, where his son was born in 

 1810. Toronto was then, and long afterwards, a very humble little 

 back-wood settlement. The Mississaga Indians, whose wigwams 

 occupied the cleared ground near the mouth of the Don, when Colonel 

 Bouchette made his first survey in 1793, long continued to haunt this 

 favourite spot ; while an Indian trail through the partially cleared pine 

 forest, to the old French Fort, and another northward to Holland 

 Landing, were the precursors of the long lines of costly stores, hotels, 

 and public buildings, which now extend for miles along King and 

 Yonge streets. 



In the midst of this conflict between the artless rudeness of savage 

 life, and the progressive energy of the Anglo-Saxon colonist, young 

 Paul grew up from boyhood, with few external influences calculated in 

 the slightest degree to stimulate artistic tastes, or to direct his attention 

 to the study of Indian manners and customs. For the Indian, as seen 

 in his worst debasement, haunting the centres of new civilisation, is 

 little calculated to attract the eye of the artist or ethnical observer. 



