Ghosts

Ghosts, 1922, is a colour woodcut by Mabel Royds in the Victoria and Albert Museum (E.216-2016) whose title and composition together place it among the more poetic and atmospheric of her interwar prints. The image — a procession of veiled, robed figures moving across the picture plane, their faces and bodies reduced to silhouettes against a flat tonal ground — has been variously read as referring to Tibetan or Himalayan religious processions, to North Indian or Burmese funeral imagery, or to a more general allegorical theme of memory and passage. Whatever the specific reference, the composition demonstrates Royds's ability to push the Anglo-Japanese colour woodcut beyond direct observation into the realm of compressed poetic imagery. The print is built from a small number of separate blocks carrying flat colour, registered with kentō notches and printed on dampened Japanese-style paper with water-based pigment in the manner she had learned from the British colour woodcut revival of the 1890s and 1900s. The dating of 1922 places the print squarely in the middle of her South Asian work, between the first Lumsden journeys of the mid-1910s and the later trips of the late 1920s, and reflects the imaginative depth that distinguishes her best work from the more straightforwardly descriptive output of some of her contemporaries.