Paul Kane's Great Nor-West

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Paul Kane’s paintings of the Native people in Canada’s North-West in
the 19th century are legendary, yet relatively little is known of the
travels that made them possible. This handsomely produced book
re-creates a heroic journey that began in 1845, when Kane set out to
cross the continent with no companions, as he put it, “but my
portfolio and a box of paints, my gun and a stock of ammunition.”
Following the Hudson’s Bay Company fur-brigade routes, Kane managed to
reach the Pacific. He returned three years later with hundreds of field
sketches and artifacts, which he used to create 100 oil paintings of
Native life. Included in this book is a wide selection of his
little-known sketches and watercolor paintings, along with a few of the
studio oils. The authors draw upon Kane’s diary to recount an
incredible journey through which Kane “lived out the Romantic dream of
escaping from nineteenth-century ‘civilization’ to the freedom of
the North American wilderness.” Paul Kane’s Great Nor-West links
biography to history and art, extending the boundaries of all three
fields.