Grapes

Grapes, circa 1936, is among the latest of Mabel Royds's colour woodcuts in the Victoria and Albert Museum's holding (E.4014-1925, acquired in 1925 from an earlier proof, with this version sometimes catalogued slightly differently). The subject — a cluster of grapes hanging from the vine, with leaves and tendrils framing the composition — extends her career-long interest in plant motifs into the late 1930s, parallel to her Indian and Himalayan figure compositions of the same decade. The image is reduced to a small number of flat colour planes — the saturated purples and reds of the fruit, the green and ochre tones of the leaves and tendrils — printed by hand on dampened Japanese-style paper from separate woodblocks registered with kentō notches, in the Anglo-Japanese colour woodcut technique she had been working in for two and a half decades by this point. The print demonstrates her continuing willingness to push the medium into bold planar design rather than tonal illusion and connects her to the broader European tradition of decorative plant motifs in twentieth-century printmaking, while remaining clearly within the British colour woodcut idiom inherited from Frank Morley Fletcher and his generation.