John Kane

JOHN KANE (formerly Cain) was a skilled workman at many trades. He was born of Irish parents in 1860 in West Calder near Edinburgh, Scotland. When he was nine he went into the coal mines where he worked until he was nineteen. In 1880 he came to America, settling in Pittsburgh. For years he worked in the coke ovens and blast furnaces, then for years he laid cobblestones in the streets of Pittsburgh. Then he got a job painting freight cars. Through the years he suffered great poverty and traveled about as an itinerant laborer in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio in search of work. About 1909 he became a carpenter and worked building rubber factories in Akron. During the first World War he worked in an ammunition plant and after the war on bridge construction. In the 1920's he was a carpenter and house painter. In 1929, at the beginning of the depression, he painted his last house when almost seventy years old.

It was his experience in painting freight cars which taught Kane the mixing of colors and started him off on his career as a Sunday painter. He tried to get into art classes at the Carnegie Institute and elsewhere but could never afford them. Once, when out of work, he tried to sell portraits, which he made by painting over enlarged photographs, for $3 to $10 each. He even applied for a job assisting John W. Alexander on his Carnegie Institute murals.

When he was about fifty years old Kane got into the habit of carrying sketching materials wherever he went, and began to spend all his spare time drawing and painting. Pittsburgh with its mills, its Scottish festivals, its slum streets, rivers and bridges, its hillsides smoking with industry, gave him the subject matter he loved. It is estimated that he finished about ninety canvases. In 1925 and 1926 he submitted to the jury of the Carnegie International Exhibition but was rejected. In 1927 Andrew Dasburg, a member of the jury, succeeded in getting Kane's painting accepted and bought it himself, and the old workman emerged at last as a recognized artist. The last seven years of his life brought him fame, but he died in poverty of tuberculosis in 1934.

Kane was the folk poet of his adopted city. He painted in direct response to his environment, seeing the hillside and river communities along the Monongahela, the Allegheny and the Ohio with the intense and simple-hearted affection of a child. He had the artisan's respect for his medium, a sure feeling for surface and pattern, and the craftsman's insistence upon exactness and carefully studied detail. "One thing I cannot abide is sloppy work in any form," he said. "I think a painting has a right to be as exact as a joist or a mold or any other part of building construction." Once when asked why he painted he said: "With art comes goodness and beauty."

Kane: I find beauty everywhere in Pittsburgh. . . . The city is my own, I have worked on all parts of it, in building the blast furnaces and then in the mills and in paving the tracks that brought the first street cars. . . . The filtration plant, the bridges that span the river, all these are my own. Why shouldn't I want to set them down when they are to some extent children of my labors and when I see them always in the light of beauty?

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