He was born John Cain to Irish parents in West Calder, Scotland on August 19, 1860. His father died when he was age 10, leaving behind a widow and 7 children. His father was employed as a grave digger in West Calder, it is said that he dug a grave on Friday and filled it on Monday. The young Kane quit school to work in the shale mines. He actually worked at Youngs Paraffin works and was so struck with the malleability of the hot paraffin moulds that he made a mask of his own face for his mother Biddy. Naturally he burned his face, but not too seriously. After his mother remarried, he emigrated to the United States at age 19, following his stepfather and older brother Patrick, who had preceded him to America and were working in Braddock, Pennsylvania, just east of Pittsburgh.
In 1891, while he was walking along the B&O railroad tracks, an engine running without its lights struck down Kane, severing his left leg 5 inches below the knee. He was fitted with an artificial limb, and his disability landed him a new job with the B&O as a watchman. He was a watchman for eight years.
Begins as a painter
He left his watchman job to paint steel railroad cars at the Pressed Steel Car Company in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, on the Ohio River just northwest of downtown Pittsburgh. He began to draw on the side of railroad cars on his lunch hour to "fill in the colors". His sketched landscapes disappeared after lunch beneath the standard, solid color of the railroad car paint. For a short time he tried to earn money by enlarging and tinting photographs for working-class families. Kane had married Maggie Halloran in 1897 at St. Mary's Catholic Church in downtown Pittsburgh. The death of an infant son in 1904 led him into a vortex of drinking and depression, which caused long periods of wandering, during which he worked as an itinerant house painter and carpenter. In Akron, Ohio in 1910 he first began to do pictorial paintings on discarded boards from construction sites. By the end of World War I, Kane was again in Pittsburgh, where he spent the remainder of his life. He remained separated from his wife and children. In both 1925 and 1926 he submitted paintings to the Carnegie Internationals sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art, but the works were rejected. The next year, however, Kane found a champion in painter–juror Andrew Dasburg, who persuaded the jury to accept Kane's Scene in the Scottish Highlands. The story of the untrained 67-year-old painter's success was trumpeted by the newspapers. The publicity around the show came to the notice of Kane's wife, who was living in West Virginia, and with whom he'd lost contact for over ten years. They reconciled and remained together during the last years of his life. When it was discovered that he had painted over discarded photographic images, purely for financial reasons, he was hounded by newspapers and unsuccessful artists who claimed him a sham. Kane continued to paint his primitive landscapes and self-portraits, including his famous Self-portrait in the collection of MoMA, New York. He had his first New York one-man show in 1931. Kane worked with Pittsburgh author and newspaper reporter, Marie McSwigan, to write Sky Hooks The Autobiography of John Kane. McSwigan recorded Kane’s life story as he told it to her during the last two years of his life. John Kane died of tuberculosis on August 10, 1934 and is interred at Pittsburgh's Roman Catholic Calvary Cemetery.
