economic reasons for composing his oil paintings in the more mannered style of the European art tradition. He wanted and had to sell his paintings to make a living, and he knew his clientele well enough: his patrons were unlikely to decorate their homes with unadorned copies in oil of his field sketches; they demanded something more presentable and closer to the generally Eurocentric expectations of the time. Kane's embellishment is evident in his painting Assiniboine hunting buffalo, one of the twelve done for the parliament. The painting has been criticized for its horses, which look more like Arabian horses than anything relevant to the Canadian West. The composition has even been found to be based on an 1816 engraving from Italy showing two Romans hunting a bull. Already in 1877, Nicholas Flood Davin commented on this discrepancy, stating that "the Indian horses are Greek horses, the hills have much of the colour and form of those of [...] the early European landscape painters, ..." And Lawrence Johnstone Burpee added in his introduction to the 1925 reprint of Kane's travel book that the sketches were "truer interpretations of the wild western life" and had "in some respects a higher value as art". Twentieth century and later art theory is less judging than Burpee but agrees insofar as Kane's field sketches are generally considered more accurate and authentic. "Kane was the recorder in the field and the artist in the studio", write Davis and Thacker. Kane is generally considered a classic and one of the most important Canadian painters. The eleven surviving paintings done for the parliament—one painting was lost in the fire on Parliament Hill in 1916—were transferred in 1955 to the National Gallery of Canada. The large Allan collection was bought by Edmund Boyd Osler in 1903 and donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1912. A collection of 229 sketches was sold by Kane's grandson Paul Kane III for about US$100,000 to the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas, in 1957. A rare painting of his, Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy, showing British surveyor John Henry Lefroy, which had been in possession of the Lefroy family in England, garnered a record price at an auction at Sotheby's in Toronto on February 25, 2002, when Canadian billionaire Kenneth Thomson won the bid at C$5,062,500 including the buyer's premium (US$3,172,567.50 at the time).