I take it all back: I’ll never say another rude word about art gallery folk.
Well, not many, anyway.
The splendid folk at the National Gallery of Ireland have an online searchable archive that allows you to look at pics, download small watermarked versions and buy larger versions if you would like to do so. And “searchable” doesn’t just mean searchable by artist or type of paint or whatever it is: you can put in important terms like “steamer” and “shannon” and “canal”.
Admittedly you don’t get much back: two steamers, none of interest on this site, nothing about the Shannon and twelve canal scenes, only two of which are in Ireland. One of them, though, is very interesting indeed, and you can see it if you use
P4457
as your search term.
You should get an 1809 pic by one John Henry Campbell entitled “Ringsend and Irishtown from the Grand Canal, Dublin”, showing three wooden canal-boats, not particularly well moored, with their crews settling in (it appears) for the evening with fires lit and some with shelters rigged.
I can’t work out where they are, though. To get Ringsend lined up with Howth in quite that way, you’d have to be pretty close to the Grand Canal Docks, I’d have thought. Any guesses or deductions?
Irish waterways history 