HTML5 Canvas background image

Why don't you style it out:

<canvas id="canvas" width="800" height="600" style="background: url('./images/image.jpg')">
  Your browser does not support the canvas element.
</canvas>

Theres a few ways you can do this. You can either add a background to the canvas you are currently working on, which if the canvas isn't going to be redrawn every loop is fine. Otherwise you can make a second canvas underneath your main canvas and draw the background to it. The final way is to just use a standard <img> element placed under the canvas. To draw a background onto the canvas element you can do something like the following:

Live Demo

var canvas = document.getElementById("canvas"),
    ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");

canvas.width = 903;
canvas.height = 657;


var background = new Image();
background.src = "http://www.samskirrow.com/background.png";

// Make sure the image is loaded first otherwise nothing will draw.
background.onload = function(){
    ctx.drawImage(background,0,0);   
}

// Draw whatever else over top of it on the canvas.