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Lichfield Locks - But whats with the boat ?


angelasoldman

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Good afternoon all,

 

Just spotted this get on E-bay, a postcard of 'Lichfield Locks' with a 'boat' of some sort that the makers have seen fit to superinpose.

 

Thought you might like it !

 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/The-Locks-Canal-Lichfield-Pre-1914-printed-/171449338538?pt=UK_Collectables_Postcards_MJ&hash=item27eb2d4aaa

 

Regards

 

Max

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Its a Yorkshire Keel whose image has been "pasted in" by photographic trickery unfortunately wildly out of scale. Not at all appropriate to the location but I suppose the photographer just wanted a "barge" to create interest in the foreground.

Paul

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Zooming in, the card's a reproduction of a painting, so the boat is just artistic licence. The painting could either be an out-of-area artist trying to get the 18th Century landscape style into the picture, or it could have been made before the artist had seen a boat on the canal, when he would surely have taken the chance to insert a nice looking horse on the towpath. As the card makers were based in Dundee, I'd guess it could well have been a Scottish artist working for Valentine's, working from a photograph, adding a boat that he'd seen in another photograph, sized to give his idea of the right perspective.

 

Nice picture for all that, and 3 quid isn't a bad price for it. I might even be tempted to borrow the image and clean it up for my desktop.

 

ETA Ah-ha....

 

http://brownhillsbob.com/2013/03/03/a-lost-travel-ticket-and-an-unknown-location-can-you-help/

 

Has a picture of this version and a monochrome version with more detail. Both cards have had the original negative modified, and there is much more detail on the mono version.

 

And the original picture:-

 

http://brownhillsbob.com/2013/03/05/natural-lore/

Edited by John Williamson 1955
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Its a Yorkshire Keel whose image has been "pasted in" by photographic trickery unfortunately wildly out of scale. Not at all appropriate to the location but I suppose the photographer just wanted a "barge" to create interest in the foreground.

Paul

This happens, I have seen a post card of a Narrowboat on the Gipping or Ipswich and Stowmarket Navigation.

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Zooming in, the card's a reproduction of a painting, so the boat is just artistic licence. The painting could either be an out-of-area artist trying to get the 18th Century landscape style into the picture, or it could have been made before the artist had seen a boat on the canal, when he would surely have taken the chance to insert a nice looking horse on the towpath. As the card makers were based in Dundee, I'd guess it could well have been a Scottish artist working for Valentine's, working from a photograph, adding a boat that he'd seen in another photograph, sized to give his idea of the right perspective. <snip>

The postcard isn't based on a painting. It's based on a photograph which has been coloured in, had the keel added and then been printed, rather than photographically reproduced.

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The postcard isn't based on a painting. It's based on a photograph which has been coloured in, had the keel added and then been printed, rather than photographically reproduced.

Absolutely agree having seen the original photo it was taken from.

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The postcard isn't based on a painting. It's based on a photograph which has been coloured in, had the keel added and then been printed, rather than photographically reproduced.

That's a fine line you're drawing, as the production method (Probably letterpress or, less likely lithography. the picture isn't good enough to show the dots from letterpress, so it's hard to tell.) would rely on a print being hand coloured, then a set of colour separation plates made for use by the printers. The easiest way to colour such a print is to use watercolour, which lets the original photographic detail show through, so it's a painting on a print from a negative. The horse and the boat on the monochrome version seem to me to have been added by the artist, not by cutting and pasting from another print.

 

Looking at the brushwork in the sky, for instance, there is nothing of the original blank white sky from the negative visible, with the clouds and blue sky having been added by the artist, so it's more painting than photograph.

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No, the boat and horse would have been taken from another photo - there are plenty of similar examples - one picture I recall is of a Thomas Clayton boat which appears to be going downhill as the perspective is all wrong. IIRC features were dropped into images by masking the negative with a suitable pieces of card on the enlarger and exposing the printing paper twice - once for the background and once for the added feature. Of course with photoshop this is a lot easier today.

Paul

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As far as I remember the original photograph is in Lichfield library, we came across it in the late 90's when researching BCN part 6 film which included the Lichfield canal (Wyrley & Essington Ogley section). We didn't copy it as we already had the postcard picture on file.

There are so few pictures of this canal in its working day and features such as the maintenance yard buildings all still extant in Darnford lane are often overlooked.

Edited by Laurence Hogg
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