Kent Monkman, born in 1965, is a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry working in a variety of mediums. His work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and at Stephen Freidman Gallery, London and in group exhibitions such as Remix: New Modernities in a Post Indian World at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Steeling the Gaze: Portraits by Aboriginal Artists at the National Gallery of Canada, We come in peace: Histories of the Americas at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.

The idea for the work, The King’s Beavers came to the artist as he was studying the history of New France in the eighteenth century, when France ceded the colony to the English. King Louis XV, who was excessively extravagant, was also a great lover of the hunt. For a gallery on the subject in his palace at Versailles he commissioned paintings of hunting scenes in distant lands. None of these, however, depicted a hunt in North America. So Kent Monkman decided to execute the picture that was missing from the royal collection, painting it in the manner of rococo artists like Nicolas Lancret and François Boucher. The work includes references to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ collection, images of New France, the Jesuits, the influence of Christianity and the explorers’ canoes.