 The
most powerful visual impression made by a traditionally
decorated narrow boat is of colour - lots of colours carefully
contrasted in tone, painted all over the boat in increasing
layers of complexity.
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The
basic stage is simply picking out the physically
separate parts of the craft in different colours,
the deck red and the hatches green for example. The main
panel on the outside of the cabin carrying the
signwriting will be one colour whilst the boards and
mouldings that frame it will be another. Little artistic
judgement is required beyond choosing the colours, for
they simply follow the boundaries of each separate part
of the boat, although this seemingly mundane treatment
is pursued to an exceptional degree on canal boats. |
The
next stage is far more peculiar however, for the boat
tradition seems to have absorbed designs from several
origins to create its own new language of decoration.
The plain flat sliding hatch, for example, that covers
the cabin entrance might carry a heart, a circle or a
playing card club design painted in red on a white or
yellow background, bordered by a scolloped edge of green
or blue. Did they ever have any deep symbolical
significance, or have they always just been a jolly
pattern, with friendly overtones of good luck? |
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| The back of the cabin usually
bears a variation of an ogee arch shape painted in two or three
colours, a symmetrical curving design rising to a point in the
middle, on the line of the cabin doors. It is reminiscent of the
chamfering patterns on old farm carts, but how did it arrive on
the boats to look so right? Any
rectangular surface is likely to be divided by diagonals into
four painted triangles of colour, whilst the end of the central
gangplank and a wide band down the centre of the cabin roof
might carry a harlequin plaid of coloured diamonds. Six petalled
compass patterns and crescent moons abound, and masses of
diamonds, scrollwork and painted borders can be added almost
indiscriminately. Even before the signwriting, roses and castles
or scrubbed white ropework are added the boat is vibrant with
painted patterns and textures.
Where
on earth did they all come from? It seems improbable that the
whole mess and pottage derives from one source.
Sea going ships and
sailormen might provide part of the answer, for some of
the constituents of the narrow boat convention do seem to be
exaggerated versions of nautical practice. The bow and stern of
almost every vessel of the world carries some sort of insignia,
from the elaborate figureheads and cherub-encrusted galleries of
the gilded men-of-war of the past to the simple emblematic eyes
and stars on the front of humble modern fishing boats. The
painted designs on the top planks of the narrow boat hull at
stem and stern certainly seem to echo that ancestry, perhaps
through the regional barges of all the rivers that were
connected together by the inland canal system of the eighteenth
century. They would all have had their own local traditions of
colour and style which in turn would have influenced the style
of the new canal boats. |
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| But the colours and
chamfer patterns of road vehicles and farm carts seem equally
influential, and as research has shown that many of the
early boatmen had previously been farmers and carters, a rural
connection seems probable as well. Add
to all that the boatwoman's domestic instincts, her distillation
of all the outward signs of house dwelling respectability into a
miniature parlour on the move, and the result was a wonderfully
fertile field for the development of the folk art tradition of
the canal age. |
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