Canvas

a brief history of the English word canvas, including what sailing, painting, and the American flag have in common with jeans and politics

When Christopher Columbus set sails in 1492 to discover a new route to India his ships were powered by wind and canvas. Renaissance artists of the same era painted their masterpieces on canvas. Canvas was still used by the Dutch masters Vincent Van Gogh and Rembrandt in the 17th century.

Betsy Ross wasn’t an artist. But in the biography of the word ‘canvas’ she has a unique place. Her name is remembered for sewing the first American flag out of canvas. That was in the 18th century.

In the 19th century, caravans of new settlers travelled West across America in Prairie Schooners, wagons with roofs made of canvas. In the 1860s a young tailor from Latvia sewed the first pair of ‘Levi’s  jeans’ out of canvas. (They weren’t called ‘Levi’s’ yet, the name came later).

Sails, the fabric used for oil paintings, a tarpaulin roof for a wagon were all made out of the same material. This sturdy hard wearing cloth was used (among other things) for workwear, tents, deck chairs, shoes worn by sailors on deck, duffel-bags used by sailors, soldiers and other travellers, and even flags. This cloth was called ‘canvas’.  

Canvas is a direct descendant of cannabis. That the life story of ‘canvas’ is entangled with its famous ancestor is inevitable. But it has also developed a life of its own, especially in its more recent history.

‘Canvas’ started its life in the English language in the 14th century. It was a sturdy cloth made out of hemp. Because hemp fibre is very similar to flax in many ways the two were sometimes confused with each other. However, hemp was the most common textile material in Europe for many centuries. Therefore we can assume that hemp did in fact make up the lion share of all canvasses in those days.

The origins of cannabis, the ancestor of canvas, are difficult to pin down. It was called ‘cannabis’ in Latin. The Romans had it from the Greeks who called it ‘kánnabis’. In Greek texts it is recorded as a word of ‘Scythian or Thracian origin’, two languages of Eastern Europe which are now extinct.

Etymologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggest that the Greeks adopted kánnabis from the Arabic ‘kunnab’, and the Arabs got it from the Syriac ‘qunnappa’. Syriac is an ancient Mesopotamian language which died out in the 14th century. There are apparently many references to ‘cannabis’ in the bible, including the use for textiles.

Bypassing such disputes, the Chinese can prove that textiles made from hemp have been around for at least 10,000 years. China was once called the ‘country of mulberry and hemp’.
Hemp textile was the main cloth worn by the ancient Chinese. They had different names for male hemp and female hemp. They used the female plants for making soft and strong cloth. It is very likely that the Arabs learned the art and craft of using cannabis for textiles from the Chinese. But they didn’t adopt the Chinese names.

In America hemp introduced by the early settlers and grown intensively for fibre until the 19th century. In fact, there have been times when it was illegal in some parts of America not to grow hemp. The crop played a key role in the independence of the New country from its European Mothercountries. The Declaration of Independence was printed on hemp paper.  
In 1938 a popular magazine called hemp the ‘first billion dollar crop’ and listed over 25,000 uses. The incredible versatility of the cannabis plant may be one of the reasons why the origins of the word are difficult to pin down.

With textiles of more limited use this is a lot easier. Many types of cloth are named simply after the town or area where they were first made. For example:

Cashmere, a luxury wool fibre from a special breed of goats is named after Kashmir in the North of India.

Damask, a rich patterned silk or linen fabric is named after Damaskus, the capital of Syria.

Muslin, a light weight cotton cloth got its name from Mosul, a city in northern Iraq.

Madras, a hand woven cotton fabric, often with a colourful check pattern, comes from Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, which was called ‘Madras’ in the past.

Satin, originally a heavy silk woven in a special way. It came from a port in China which the Arabs called Zayton.

Canvas is named after the fibre from which it was originally made. However, if you read ‘oil on canvas’ under the title of a contemporary painting you can be pretty sure that it doesn’t have a single thread of hemp in it.

Contemporary canvas fabric is often a mix of cotton and polyester. It can also be 100% cotton, or 100% manmade fibre. The word ‘canvas’ can mean a painting or a blank fabric stretched over a wooden frame. It can be a tarpaulin or a sail, a tent or piece of strong fabric.

Canvas has produced one offspring. It’s called ‘canvass’, nowadays mainly used in the sense of gathering followers. How did hemp fabric make the leap into ‘drumming up support’ for a cause or project?

Canvass was first recorded in English around 1500. It’s always been a verb, and it meant ‘to toss in a canvas sheet’. Here the canvas sheet was probably used more like a sieve than a container. You can tell because the word was soon used in the sense of ‘sift through canvas’, ‘shake out’, or ‘examine carefully’.

In the figurative sense the ‘canvas sheet’ gradually became more like netting — remember that fishing nets were made from hemp too in those days. So when canvassing started to be used in the sense of ‘gaining voters in an election campaign’ in the 1610s it was not such a big leap after all.