Boat Builders

Boat Builders, circa 1920-1930, is a colour woodcut by Mabel Royds depicting figures at work on a boat under construction, acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2016 (E.213-2016). The subject — boat builders shaping a hull on a dry-dock or beach — points to one of the Mediterranean or Indian coastal stops on the Lumsden journeys of the 1920s, although the specific location has not been identified in the museum record. Royds reduces the scene to a small number of flat planar shapes — the silhouettes of the figures, the curved bulk of the hull, the framing landscape — and prints them in saturated water-based colour from separate blocks on dampened paper, in the Anglo-Japanese colour woodcut manner she had developed during her Edinburgh years. The image belongs to the same group of working-figure compositions as The Sword Grinder (Jodhpur), Donkey Boy, and The Goatherd: prints that translate her direct observation of labour and craft during her foreign journeys into the simplified colour woodcut idiom of the British revival movement. The relatively wide dating range reflects the difficulty of pinning down many of her undated prints to specific journeys, but it places the work firmly in her mature period.