Edinburgh Castle

Edinburgh Castle, 1911, is the earliest dated print in the Victoria and Albert Museum's holding of Mabel Royds's work (E.222-2016) and one of the few among her surviving woodcuts to take a Scottish subject directly. The image shows the dark mass of the castle rock on its volcanic plug, with the silhouette of the castle buildings on top and a tree in the foreground, the composition treated as a flat-planar design in saturated colour rather than as a topographical view. The print was made in the year of her marriage to Ernest Stephen Lumsden and her appointment to the staff of the Edinburgh College of Art, and it represents her arrival in Edinburgh and her first sustained engagement with the city that would remain her base for the rest of her life. The technique is the Anglo-Japanese colour woodcut she had begun to absorb at the start of the 1910s — a separate block for each colour, printed in water-based pigment on dampened paper, registered with kentō notches — and the image suggests the kind of training in flat colour design she would refine over the following three decades. It is also a rare insight into her response to her new home, before the journeys to India and the Himalayas with Lumsden gave her the subject matter that would dominate her mature production.