The Art of Portuguese Conservas de Peixe
Are these designs so captivating because Portugal loves the bold and the colorful? Are they so eye-catching because the tinned fish market is so competitive? Are they incredibly entertaining and informative because they’re selling something that you can’t see but that you need to trust is going to be safe and tasty?
Yes.
I have to admit that when a neighbor at a Christmas party mentioned the designs on canned fish he'd seen in Portugal, I went home that evening and immediately started researching. There’s no shortage of articles online about these little tinned beauties so my idea for an article about them was dead on arrival but that's just part and parcel to the freelance writer. You have a 1000 ideas and 999 of them have been done so you move on to the next one.
The art director in me however can't help but share inspiration so here's a little primer on this fascinating industry and its graphic excellence.
“In the beginning, designs were imported from France,” says director of special projects at CAN THE CAN Victor Vicente of the earliest Portuguese tins. “But as Spanish, Italians and some Greeks started companies in Portugal, a national style quickly developed.”
Historical depiction of the varina, or fishwife.
That style was laden with symbolism. In addition to the Fishwife, the Greco-Roman goddess Minerva and the fisherman of Matosinhos, a Northern Portugese city known for its seafaring and industrial heritage, quickly became household staples. Heroes and famous figures, like Baron de Rothschild, were worked into designs. “It's a very emotional business full of histories and memories,” says Vicente.
A tin of Portuguese sardines in oil illustrated by J. Reis Silva in Revista Internacional, 1937.
Portugal’s dictatorial Estado Novo regime found its national symbolism valuable, too. Starting in 1933, it threw its weight behind the country’s booming canned goods industry and its more traditional branding styles as part of its interest in the “preservation of traditional customs and practices,” according to Luis Mendonça, graphic designer and owner of cannery Ati Manel, which his grandfather founded in 1922. This visual culture, which showcased folk heritage and the Portuguese idyll, was propped up and mostly preserved until the Estado Novo was overthrown in the ‘70s.
Block quotes from: The Canny Creatives Behind the Tinned Fish Revival by Ellie Howard
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