Canal Narrowboat Art – Roses and Castles

There certainly are roses of a sort in profusion, but there are also daisy-cum-marigold shaped flowers, dahlia/ chrysanthemums, pansy/primroses and other strange floral hybrids invented by the brush of the painter working at speed. Castles or big country houses predominate in the picture panels, but there are also churches, cottages, lighthouses and portraits of dogs, horses and the sailor’s head from Players cigarette advertisements. The earliest written reference to narrow boat painting in 1858 describes it as in … “the style of the great teaboard school of art“, the sort of common commercial work that decorated cheap tin trays and trinkets, what we might today disparagingly term ‘chocolate box art’ catering for undiscerning popular taste.

In 1873 another journalist says the landscapes are usually river scenes, very naively painted but … “whilst the tree might stagger a botanist … the whole serves its first purpose as a decoration, which our more pretentious art so frequently misses“.

And it certainly did decorate, nearly everything. The drinking water can on the cabin roof was painted and decorated, as was the wash basin, cabin stool, headlamp, bucket and the horse’s feed tin. Pictures and posies adorned the walls inside the cabin, the built-in furniture and the little doors that led into it. On the most elaborately decorated craft the painted decorations spread all over the outside of the boat and its equipment as well, entwined with the lettering on the cabin side, on the rudder and on the gang plank supports. Roses even appeared on the horse harness.

Commercial pressure has played a large part in shaping the present tradition, a balance between what was desired and what could be afforded, what could be produced for the available money.

What the boat people desired was intricacy, an illusion of riches, an obvious extravagance of pattern and texture to counteract the actual paucity of their possessions. What the painters provided was a fast technique for painting floral sprays and romantic landscapes to order, in profusion, on any object or in any space available.

Flower painting was reduced to a formal system of decorating things with a floral effect, simple roundels of background colour worked up with a few brushstroke petals to suggest roses or daisies, nestling in an enclosing pattern of leaves.

Castle pictures were built with a few simple ochery-cream towers painted against a background of clouds, sky and distant misty mountains created with a few brushstrokes of blended blue and white. Greens and browns were brushed into a foreground garden, finished with a mass of feathery trees and bushes. There might be a bridge, fences, swans or sailing boats, just as the artist fancied (or his skill allowed) but the confidence gained by regular practice usually ensured a brash charm to the handling of the paint.

In many cases the attractiveness of the art is largely due to the polished slickness of the commercial technique.