1860-1934 American painter of Scottish birth. In 1879 Kane emigrated to western Pennsylvania. 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 (b 1887), accepted Kane's Scene in the Scottish Highlands (1927; Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mus. A.). 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. Larimer Avenue Bridge (1932; Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mus. A.) is characteristic of his style with its meticulous detail, flat colour and dominant green and red. Though he sketched and painted on the site, Kane freely transposed pictorial elements to create a more pleasing composition. This innate compositional sense is evident in his Self-portrait (1929; New York, MOMA).   Related Paintings of John Kane :. | portrait of a child holding a rattle | The Horse Trade (mk13) | Henry William Baynton | Detail of St.Barbara | sjoslaget vid helgoland |
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Robert S.Duncanson
American artist . 1821-1872 A self-taught mulatto artist and a landscape painter of the Hudson River school tradition, Duncanson was the first Afro-American artist to receive international recognition. Born into a family of painters and handymen, Duncanson first worked as a house-painter and glazier in Monroe, MI. By 1841 he was in Cincinnati, OH, where he learnt to paint by executing portraits and copying prints. Throughout the 1840s he travelled as an itinerant artist between Cincinnati, Monroe and Detroit.
Theodor Kittelsen
1857-1914,was a Norwegian artist born in the coastal town of Kragero in Norway. He is famous for his nature paintings on the one hand, and on the other hand for his illustrations of fairytales and legends, especially of trolls. For a time, Kittelsen studied painting and watchmaking. When his talent was discovered by Diderich Maria Aall, he attended classes at the School of Art in Christiania (the present Oslo). Because of generous financial support by Aall he was able to continue his study in Munich. However, in 1879 Diderich Aall could no longer manage to support him, so Kittelsen had to earn his money as a draughtsman for German papers and magazines. When back in Norway, he found nature to be a great inspiration. Kittelsen started to write texts to his drawings here. In 1881, Kittelsen was hired to illustrate Norwegian fairy-tales by the Norwegian folklore collector Peter Christen Asbjornsen. His style could be classified between (Neo-)Romantic and naive painting. As a national artist he is highly respected and well known in Norway, but does not receive much international attention, which is the reason that his name is hardly registered in registers of painters. Black metal bands such as Burzum have used nearly all of his pictures as album art, notably illustrations taken from Kittelsen book Svartedauen (The Black Death).
john masefield
(born June 1, 1878, Ledbury, Herefordshire, Eng. ?? died May 12, 1967, near Abingdon, Berkshire) English poet. He went to sea in his youth, then lived precariously for several years in the U.S. before settling in London. He is best known for his poems of the sea, Salt-Water Ballads (1902, including "Sea Fever" and "Cargoes"), and for his long narrative poems, such as The Everlasting Mercy (1911), containing phrases of colloquial coarseness that were unknown in earlier 20th-century English verse. After he became poet laureate in 1930, his poetry became more austere. He also wrote adventure novels, sketches, and works for children.