Girl and Goat

Girl and Goat, circa 1912, is one of the earliest of Mabel Royds's surviving colour woodcuts, given to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1925 (E.4015-1925) and one of two Royds prints (with Grapes) that entered the museum's collection before the much larger 2016 acquisition. The subject — a young girl standing with a goat — is a pastoral image of the kind that was common in early-twentieth-century British colour woodcut, drawn loosely from the same arts-and-crafts country-life imagination that animated the work of Catherine Wallace, Florence Robinson, and others among the women colour woodcut artists of the period. Royds reduces the scene to a small number of flat planar shapes — the silhouette of the girl, the bulk of the goat, and the background — printed in saturated water-based colour from separate blocks on dampened paper in the Anglo-Japanese manner. The early date and the museum acquisition in 1925 place the print at the beginning of her Edinburgh career and confirm that her work was already being recognised by major British public collections within a few years of her arrival at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1911.