Mabel Royds

Mabel Allington Royds (1874-1941) was an English painter and colour woodcut printmaker whose mature work, produced largely in Edinburgh between roughly 1912 and the late 1930s, occupies a distinctive place in the British colour woodcut revival of the early twentieth century. Working in a medium that British artists of her generation had reinvented after the Japanese model — the so-called "Anglo-Japanese" colour woodcut associated with John Dickson Batten, Frank Morley Fletcher, William Giles, Allen Seaby, and the Society of Graver-Printers in Colour — Royds developed a personal style that combined direct observation, restrained colour, and the simplified planar composition that came naturally to the multi-block water-based technique. Her best-known prints emerged from her travels in India, Tibet, Burma, and North Africa undertaken with her husband, the etcher Ernest Stephen Lumsden (1883-1948), and she returned repeatedly to a recognizable cast of motifs: porters and animal handlers, market figures, hill villages, and the everyday fauna and flora of the places she visited. The Victoria and Albert Museum's holding of fourteen prints, acquired across several donations between 1925 and 2016, is the most accessible institutional resource for her work today.

Royds was born on 31 December 1874 in Little Barford, Bedfordshire, the daughter of the Reverend Edmund Royds, the Anglican rector of the parish. She enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, around 1893, following the standard curriculum of antique and life drawing under Frederick Brown and Henry Tonks, in the years when Augustus and Gwen John, William Orpen, and others of the "Slade generation" were her contemporaries. After the Slade she spent extended periods in Paris in the late 1890s and very early 1900s, where she worked in the studio of Walter Sickert. From around 1901 to 1908 she lived in Toronto, Canada, where she taught at Havergal Ladies' College, an Anglican girls' boarding school then under headmistress Ellen Knox.

In 1911 Royds married Ernest Stephen Lumsden in London, and the couple settled in Edinburgh, where Lumsden was already established as a leading British etcher and a senior figure at the Edinburgh College of Art. Royds joined the College staff in 1911 and was appointed Mistress of Antique and Life Drawing, a position she held for several decades. The combination of teaching and a settled domestic base in Edinburgh, paired with extended foreign travels in alternate years, became the structural pattern of her professional life. The marriage was both personal and artistic: Lumsden's etchings of India and the Himalayas, particularly his celebrated views of Benares and the Tibetan plateau, share their subject matter with several of Royds's most important woodcuts, and the two clearly worked from a shared body of sketches and direct experience.

Royds's woodcuts were produced as multi-block colour prints in the Anglo-Japanese manner: a separate block carved for each colour, printed by hand on dampened Japanese-style paper with water-based pigments, and registered with the kentō notch system introduced into Britain in the 1890s through Frank Morley Fletcher's teaching. Unlike the more traditionalist British colour woodcut artists, Royds pushed the technique into broader, more painterly planes of colour, allowed visible grain and brush-stroke marks, and reduced her palette to a small number of distinctive saturated hues rather than imitating the atmospheric broken colour that Fletcher's and Seaby's followers preferred. The result is an instantly recognizable graphic identity in which figures and animals are reduced to a few essential silhouettes and the colour is deployed at the level of design rather than illusion.

The earliest of her surviving prints date from her first years in Edinburgh: Edinburgh Castle (1911) is one of the few Royds woodcuts on a Scottish subject; Girl and Goat (circa 1912) and Chestnut Burrs (circa 1912) treat pastoral and natural-history motifs typical of British colour woodcut at the period; The Tightrope Dancer (circa 1913) is a more ambitious figure subject and Sunspots (circa 1913) exemplifies the pure-landscape strand of the movement. The most distinctive group of her prints came out of her extended South Asian travels. Between 1913 and the late 1920s she and Lumsden made multiple journeys to India, Tibet, and Burma. The Sword Grinder (Jodhpur) of circa 1918-1920 depicts an itinerant sword-grinder at work; Donkey Boy (circa 1924) a young handler with his donkey; The House-top (circa 1920) and The Goatherd (circa 1920) hill-village scenes drawn from direct observation rather than picturesque convention. Ghosts (1922) is a more poetic image of a procession of veiled figures, while Gompa Top (circa 1920-1930) translates Himalayan monastic architecture into a flat, planar colour woodcut. Boat Builders (circa 1920-1930), Prickly Pear Cactus (circa 1924), and Grapes (circa 1936) extend the range into plant motifs and coastal subjects across her mature decades.

Royds exhibited regularly with the Society of Graver-Printers in Colour from her election in 1912 onward, with the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and at the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in London. She sold steadily through these society exhibitions and through dealers including the Fine Art Society in London and Aitken Dott in Edinburgh, and her prints entered the V&A, the British Museum, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and several regional British museums during her lifetime. She died in Edinburgh on 24 July 1941, at the age of sixty-six. Her woodcuts were under-recognised in the post-war decades but began to recover critical attention from the 1970s and 1980s onward through scholarship on the British colour woodcut revival. Within the longer comparative history of the colour woodcut, Royds is best understood as one of the small group of British artists who absorbed the Japanese technical model through the Anglo-Japanese movement and then adapted it to non-Japanese subject matter — particularly the Indian and Himalayan scenes that defined her mature production — placing her in the wider company of figures like Bertha Lum, Helen Hyde, and Emma Bormann who were doing comparable work in other Western centres during the same decades.