Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver's Island and Oregon through The Hudson's Bay Company's Territory and Back Again

London. Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts. 1859. 1st Edition. Hardcover. 8vo, 21.5cm, The First Edition, xvii,[1],455p., appendix, with folding coloured frontis map and 8 full colour lithographed plates, 13 woodcut text illustrations, rebound in half calf over marbled boards, with leather label, wanting the half title, the map is wrinkled, the text has some smudge marks, or dust soiling, the plates have some occasional smudges on the margins, but are good clear impressions with vibrant hand colouring, good to very good. (cgc) Lande 1258. T.P.L. 2911. Peel 212. Sabin 37007. Howes K-7. Field 811. Graff 2262. Strathern 290. Wagner-Camp 332:1. The son of an Irish immigrant to Toronto, Kane became one of Canada's most famous nineteenth century painters. After four years studying art in Europe, he returned to paint North American Indians. It was a time of cultivated interest in primitive societies and Kane's paintings somewhat romanticize his subjects. They are, however, an eloquent record of Indian culture as it was, largely untouched by White influence. He set out alone with paintbox and gun in 1845 and spent a summer in the Lake Huron and Lake Michigan regions, mainly sketching the Ojibway. For the next three years he went further west, often travelling with Hudson's Bay company fur traders. From this journey which took him across the Rockies and eventually to Vancouver Island he brought back several hundred sketches. Kane spent the following years in his studio developing the sketches into hundreds of oil paintings, eight of which are reproduced as colour lithographs in this book. The finest works are probably the portraits of Indian chiefs, but the scenes of tribal ceremonies and buffalo hunting on the plains have a poignant interest as a record of a vanished world. The text of the book is the diary Kane kept on his travels.