All About Fort Edmonton by Paul Kane

Title of Artwork: “Fort Edmonton”

Artwork by Paul Kane

Year Created 1856

Summary of Fort Edmonton

Drawing freely from nature or using the camera lucida, Kane’s desire to document his surroundings would still have encouraged him to approach and view the world empirically in a certain way. Fort Edmonton exemplifies Kane’s use of the picturesque style, in which the viewer is able to “travel” through the image thanks to elevated viewpoints and sinuous land formations.

All About Fort Edmonton

Images of Hudson’s Bay Company forts have never been documented despite the fact that Kane spent long periods of time working at HBC posts. J. Russell Harper, an art historian, points out that the artist’s panoramic views of the company’s presence in the landscape enhance the sense of its empire. With its palisades and corner towers, Fort Edmonton must have seemed to Kane the New World equivalent of an Old World castle-like Harlech in North Wales, which is situated on a rock overlooking the water. In his early years, Kane copied a print of Harlech Castle that he had yet to identify.

Kane drew the fort from two different perspectives, one from the southeast and the other from the south, in pencil. Kane chose to paint the fort from the south, where a path parallels the river and leads up to it. He found himself staring at a scene with two focal points: the river on the left and his path to the fort at his right. Kane had to find a way to merge the two points of interest into a single, pleasing image. Clouds were used in the upper left quadrant to create a “S” shaped movement that draws attention to and connects the foreground with the promontory, as well as to the sky and distant distances.

Imperialist ideologies are frequently used to frame current interpretations of the picturesque. When viewed in this light, Kane’s inclusion of the fort, the teepees, and the river, all of which played an important role in the fur trade, shows his understanding of the economic ties between the British Empire and the colony.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.