Kane’s story quintessential Pittsburgh

but he was sagacious and enlightened, able to see and honor beauty when others saw gray, grimy, shabby, heavy and tedious. He saw the sky. He painted from hillsides the scenes in valleys below. He painted Pittsburgh up one side and down the other.

In 1927, after several failed efforts to get a painting in the Carnegie International — then the only international art show in America — his “Scene from the Scottish Highlands” was chosen.

Many people got sniffy, calling him a mere house painter. That kind of story gives off a scent that makes a newspaper reporter pull the leash to scamper toward it. Marie McSwigan of the Pittsburgh Press sought Kane for an interview, but he was on a scaffold in Ingram, painting a house at the time. They met later. She followed his art career and assembled his story as “Sky Hooks” near the end of his life, which he lost to tuberculosis.

The painting the Carnegie accepted sold for $50, the most he had made on a painting to that point. At his death, $235 was the largest sum he had made. Two years after he died, his paintings began to fetch thousands.

He supported a wife and two daughters but never had excess, so his grave in Calvary Cemetery in Greenfield, high on a hill from which he used to paint, is unmarked.

Today, his works hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection, the Carnegie Museum of Art and numerous others.

In Mr. Crowninshield’s account, he writes: “Once, when someone asked him why he so often painted Pittsburgh, he said: ‘Why shouldn’t I? I helped to build Pittsburgh’s mills and homes. I paved its streets, made its steel and painted its houses. It is my city.”