John Kane (1860-1934)
Turtle Creek Valley No. 1, c. 1930
An American painter of Scottish birth, Kane immigrated to western Pennsylvania in 1879. He worked as a bricklayer, coal miner, steel worker and carpenter in the Ohio River valley and, in 1890, began to sketch local scenery. After losing his leg in a train accident in 1891, he was employed painting railway carriages. When his son died in 1904, Kane left his family and spent years wandering and working in odd jobs. His earliest surviving paintings date from around 1910. Settling in Pittsburgh, he worked as a house painter and in his spare time painted portraits, religious subjects, the city’s urban landscape and memories of his Scottish childhood. In 1927 the jury of the Carnegie International Exhibition, Pittsburgh, encouraged by the painter–juror Andrew Dasburg, accepted Kane’s Scene in the Scottish Highlands. Kane’s success, at first considered a hoax by the press, was based on the modernist interest in primitive and folk art. His work was regarded as non-academic and boldly original and he became the first contemporary American folk artist to be recognized by a museum.
His Turtle Creek Valley 1 (c. 1930), was one of several inspired by this view. Pittsburgh’s many valleys and rivers made it a city of bridges, common elements in his work. Kane’s painting depicts the sturdy concrete spans of the George Westinghouse Bridge. The artist had a keen eye for local detail, and the city’s bridges, trains, and hills were among his favorite subjects: “I find beauty everywhere in Pittsburgh. It is the beauty of the past which the present has not touched. The city is my own.”
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