The Tightrope Dancer

The Tightrope Dancer, circa 1913, is one of the earliest mature colour woodcuts in Mabel Royds's Edinburgh period, made shortly after her marriage to Ernest Stephen Lumsden and her appointment to the staff of the Edinburgh College of Art. The Victoria and Albert Museum's copy (E.219-2016) was acquired in 2016 as part of a group of fourteen Royds prints intended to give institutional shape to her output. The subject — a tightrope walker balanced on a wire, with the secondary figures of attendants or audience members visible below — points to her early interest in performers, fair-grounds, and street entertainments, a subject she would return to in The Sword Grinder (Jodhpur) and Donkey Boy a decade later in an Indian setting. The print is constructed from several separate blocks of flat colour, printed in the Anglo-Japanese manner with water-based pigment on dampened paper, with the silhouette of the dancer and her line treated as the central design element of the page. The composition reflects Royds's Slade-trained ability with the human figure, set within a colour woodcut language that she had begun to develop in the years immediately following her marriage and her relocation to Edinburgh.