 Write
what you know says the old saying and after more years than I really
wish to be reminded about I know something about painting canal castles.
However I still do not know why. Why castles? Why are they painted on
canal boats and why is it so important that they should be painted on
boats anyway? For me it is still more like an act of faith, part of an
accepted ritual for keeping elephants away. You haven’t seen any
elephants? Well then, it must be working.
Aesthetically the well-painted working narrow boat was
a complex balance of many elements, all blending utility with grace.
There was the shape of the boat and the quality of the craftsman’s work
that affected the design both in the big broad sweeps of the sheer of
the hull and the quality of the detailing, the finishing touches. There
were the colours, the intensity of the colour and the balance of the
tonal contrast from dark to bright and there were the patterns, the
hearts and diamonds and the swooping curves of the ogee arch. Finally,
tucked away in this mass of abstract painted textures and shapes was the
naturalistic decorative art of the boatpainter, the swags of flowers and
the castle landscapes. Why? What made them so right in the industrial
canals of the nineteenth century that a traditional working boat without
them looks naked and undressed?
Who started it and why? Whose castles are they—the
boatpainter’s or the boatman’s? Perhaps they actually belong to a
period, a particular way of thinking-- part of the zeitgeist, the spirit
of that time? If that is so what actual message do they carry from that
past? They do talk to me but only in a garbled language that I cannot
fully understand.
Our earliest written reference is still John
Hollingshead writing in Household Words magazine in 1858 about a couple
of landscapes painted on the cabin side of his Grand Junction Canal fly
boat. Each has “a lake, a castle, a sailing boat, and a range of
mountains painted after the style of the great teaboard school of art.”
A teaboard was what we would now call a teatray, and his slightly
disparaging remark is likening the boat painting to the cheap commercial
mass productions of the japanned ware industries of Wolverhampton and
Birmingham. However, mass production then meant hand painting on an
industrial scale with workshops full of painters, or perhaps paintresses,
applying the designs with practised skill at great speed. Today we would
probably be rather more impressed. Oh, if only we had some well-provenanced
examples so that we could know what he was really talking about. Were
they crude, cheap and childlike, or little graceful delights like those
on the painted dials of grandfather clocks of the period? Understanding
his description depends so much on understanding his own taste,
experience and expectations of that time.
These ruminations were focussed for me during a recent
pleasurable job helping a friend improve her boat painting skills. She
and her husband are Cheshire/ Shropshire people and they very properly
want their boat to carry the north-western style of boat painting, the
‘knobstick’ style of Bill Hodgson of Stoke on Trent. So we set to work
for a day to try and analyse and emulate his style of castle painting.
Whether one likes his style or not (and I admit to reservations) he is
and was an important link to the boat painting world of the past. When
he married in 1908 he already defined himself as a boat painter and he
practised that trade exclusively almost non-stop until his death in
1957. He was a prolific painter and happily there are many examples of
his work still about. What is also crucial is that he had set out in
life in the 1890s with the ambition of being a proper artist, painting
proper pictures in frames to hang on the wall. Thus he came to the job
of boat painting with a knowledge of contemporary aesthetics and a
rather more developed set of artistic skills than many of his
contemporaries, most of whom were primarily boatbuilders. He was also
already at work only fifty years after Hollingshead’s description so
whilst we were studying and copying Bill’s work we could feel that we
were nearly reconnecting with at least one style of the nineteenth
century again.
Hodgson’s work is fairly easy to recognise for he
painted to a very set formula that seems to have varied little over the
many years of his working life. He did paint some fairly elaborate
improvisations on his usual themes late in his life but his
run-of-the-mill boat decoration usually falls into a characteristic set
pattern. His castles are usually symmetrical, starting with a pair of
towers flanking a gatehouse placed centrally on a hill, with bushes
bracketing the building on either side like bookends. But it is not the
buildings themselves that are so memorable so much as the heavy, almost
gloomy atmosphere that he creates with his particular style of paintwork
and his choice of colours. He starts by setting his scene against a
striking colourful sunset with distant mountains darkly outlined against
the red of the setting sun giving them something of the threatening
prescience of Mordor. In order to create enough contrast to make his
buildings read against this lurid background he resorts to shading all
his towers on both sides with a deep burnt sienna firmly outlined in
black, each decisively crowned with three massive black crenellations.
This leaves the buildings apparently theatrically floodlit from the
front, awaiting the entry of the brigands and cruel nobility that such a
set surely deserves. The only notes of lightness are the white sails of
the boats becalmed in the lake on either side.
What is he telling us? What piece of late Victorian
sentiment is expressed in these haunting scenes of waiting? Is it Bill
doing the talking or is he expressing just what the boat population
wanted him to say for them? His work was immensely popular with the
northern narrow boatmen for a very long time but is it deeply meaningful
or really just a bit of painted cheering up? I’ll just keep on keeping
the elephants away for now. |
