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When you were very young, did you ever yearn for a great big paintbox like this?

The 92 cake behemoth paintbox of my dreams, by Page of London.
(Click it to see it bigger, please.)

I remember wishing for a really big paintbox while using the piddly little 12 and 18 tablet jobs that were just within range of my minuscule pocket money, and struggling to make clean mixes from the small thin tablets of grainy colour. I nearly always ended up with mud.
The paper available to me at the time had a nasty rough texture that was amazingly absorbent. The people who made it must have been trying to put young people off the idea of painting.
I think it was called sugar paper, though I can’t for the life of me imagine the link between sugar and paper, unless sugar was once sold wrapped in this nasty feeling stuff? (It was. - ed)

The smell of those paints is something I can recall with great clarity across all these years. It was given off by the gum used as binder for the colours.

A few years into my junior painting career I finally managed to obtain one of these lovely ninety two colour tin paintboxes. I had the idea that the more colours I had at my disposal, the less likely I was to make mud. I was mistaken of course, because it never occurred to me to use two water pots to keep my crappy little brush and palette clean, so I went on merrily polluting my colours as I dabbled them together. The paintbox was left behind with so many other aspects of my childhood many many years ago.

I picked up the example above on eBay a couple of years ago for pennies; far less money than it was originally sold for way back in the day. Mind you, it was rather well used:

Someone else had been happily making mud in this paintbox, and you can see clearly how thin the little tablets of paint were.

It was made by a company called Page of London who once dominated the kiddy paintbox market in Britain and its former colonies.

Once you get past its period charm, you begin to see some seriously disturbing perspective weirdness. Notice how the ship and the row of cranes have diverging vanishing points even though the ship is presumably parallel to the dockside cranes. The scale of the lorry is completely out of whack with the train, which in turn makes nonsense of other scale relationships between the porters, their barrows and so on.
Throw in the dangerously low flying aircraft and what appears to be an attempt at lowering cargo straight down funnel number two, and you begin to understand why the boy on the left might seem to be jabbing himself in the eye with a large bodkin. I wonder how much the illustrator was paid for this.

There’s one more tiny but puzzling detail in this lid design. It’s the name of the ship: ‘Royal Blue’. When you open the paintbox there must be nine or ten different blues; but no Royal Blue. This is not odd in itself, but when you see one of their other tins that also includes the name of a colour (Vermilion) splashed large on the side of a bus in the scene, you start to wonder if there is a continuing theme running through all the lid designs.

A double decker called Vermilion(A)

Unfortunately my swift (read: lazy) sweep of the web looking for more evidence to support this theory didn’t turn up any more examples to support the idea. You’re welcome to send in further examples if you know of any, or better still, own one of these paintboxes.

Here are a few more that I found on the web, and I bet that whatever they look like, they’ll all have that unforgettable smell.

Alice In Wonderland.

Robin Hood.

This last one is arresting. Can you spot any strangeness in this picture?

The Girl, The Pony and the Kite Flier.

Sadly, my web search for Page of London did not reveal that the company was still in existence. It would be nice to know that they had somehow made it through to the 21st century, but I suspect that they would have had to abandon the decorative tins somewhere along the journey into this century, and adopt boring plastic packaging just like everyone else. (I also wonder what happened to the illustrator - Did he / she go on to do covers for colouring books? The style would suggest a strong aptitude for that kind of work.)
Whatever the outcome for the company, this end of the artist materials market is being very well supplied by the Chinese now. (Supplies! Supplies!)