Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpt from American Workman: The Life and Art of John Kane by Maxwell King and Louise Lippincott From the Introduction One of the images that captured him, and drew him away from his schoolwork, was of French and Prussian soldiers, which appeared in the local press during the War of 1870. As his class-room attention drifted, the young Kane began drawing his recol-lection of the fierce look of the warriors. He became so engrossed in his depiction of the soldiers that he never heard the teacher's cane tapping on the desk at the front of the room. When Kane finally did look up, he found that a number of other students had gathered around him to see what he was creating. And school-master Walker was furious at losing control of his whole class.

By the time the boy saw what was happening, it was too late: Kane had to accept his due, a half-dozen whacks to his hand from the schoolmaster's cane. Kane's devotion to his art, and his skill as an artist, grew through the years after he emigrated to America, even as he made his living as a workingman who struggled to find enough time to draw and paint. Although he found more and more ways to commercialize his skills, and produced more and more exceptional work, success and renown eluded him. He was always a risk taker, moving frequently and shifting professions to capitalize on the directions taken by the US economy and manufacturing. He was driven, certainly, by his own curiosity and his questing nature, but he was also driven by an escapism fueled by his addiction to drink. No risk in all of Kane's unsettled life was more audacious than his decision, at the age at which most people are retiring from work, to try to enter his paintings into the most prestigious of American art exhibits: the Carnegie International. Shortly after its founding as the Carnegie Institute Department of Fine Arts, in 1895, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh had embarked on a journey to create an international art exhibit that would attract the best in the world. By the 1920s the annual exhibition--today known as the Carnegie International and held every four years--had become enormously influential in the art world.

Many of the world's premier artists--including Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Camille Pissarro, and John Singer Sargent--showed at the exhibition over the years. And such renowned figures as Thomas Eakins, Robert Henri, and Winslow Homer served on the juries that judged admittance of the works of the increasingly exclusive list of artists.