In the first of these two articles looking at paintings of canoes, kayaks, dugouts and similar craft during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I showed examples painted by intrepid travellers to Lapland, Greenland and Canada.

By the River of Tuonela (1903) was a study completed in preparation for Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s frescoes in the Jusélius Mausoleum in Pori, a lavish memorial to the daughter of an affluent businessman. This shows Lemminkäinen, one of the characters in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, as he gets into his canoe to shoot a swan on this river in the Underworld.

Most of my remaining canoes were painted in Canada, the first by Emily Carr, who excelled in her paintings of First Nations in the early twentieth century.

Carr’s First Nations War Canoes in Alert Bay, 1912 (1912) shows three large canoes in this Kwakwaka’wakw village on Cormorant Island, just off the north coast of Vancouver Island. Unusually for her paintings, it includes a small group of figures, who are talking together under the prominent tree behind the canoes.

That same year, the Canadian artist Tom Thomson started to paint during his canoe expeditions from Toronto.

Thomson’s initial oil paintings are quite meticulously realist, even his oil sketches such as The Canoe (1912). He was to become very familiar with paddling in open canoes like this one over the following years.

Old Lumber Dam, Algonquin Park (1912) shows a scene from his first canoeing and painting trip.

Four years later, Boats (1916) shows the ‘pointer’ craft used by loggers, giving the lower half of the painting an autumnal fire to contrast with the fresh spring foliage in the band above. The exposed ground at the left and right edges is consistent with this work being painted in a pochade box of the type owned by Thomson at the time.

The Pointers (1916-17) is a larger canvas that Thomson painted in his Toronto studio during the following winter. Its title refers to the loggers’ pointer boats shown crossing this lake.

The following summer, Thomson set off to paddle to Tea Lake Dam, shown here in his vigorous sketch of this part of Algonquin Park. He was last seen on 8 July by a Park Ranger there. His body was discovered eight days later, drowned in the lake which he had paddled in and had painted so often. He was just a month short of his fortieth birthday.

Although not a true canoe, skiffs feature in several of the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte, another great watersports enthusiast, and his Skiffs on the Yerres from 1877 is too wonderful to omit.

Paddle safely!