Prickly Pear Cactus

Prickly Pear Cactus, circa 1924, is a colour woodcut by Mabel Royds in the Victoria and Albert Museum (E.221-2016) that exemplifies the plant subjects she developed in parallel with her better-known figure compositions from India and the Himalayas. The motif — the broad fleshy paddles and yellow flowers of the prickly pear (Opuntia) — points either to her North African travels or to a Mediterranean stop on one of the longer Lumsden journeys of the early 1920s. The composition is reduced to a small number of flat-planar elements: the silhouetted cactus paddles in saturated green, the yellow flower clusters, and a flat background, with the colour blocks printed in the Anglo-Japanese manner with water-based pigment on dampened paper. Royds's interest in plant subjects connects her to the wider tradition of British colour woodcut of the period, in which figures such as Allen Seaby and Robert Gibbings produced highly distilled colour prints of birds, plants, and small animals; her treatment, however, is more graphically simplified and less interested in textural illusion than the Seaby school. The print belongs to the period during which Royds had become a senior teacher at the Edinburgh College of Art and was exhibiting regularly with the Society of Graver-Printers in Colour and the Royal Scottish Academy.