Three drawings by Mabel Royds

 

I heard more today about what happened to the large collection of work by Mabel Royds that was left in her studio following her death in 1941. I have to say I was surprised by the variety but what you see here are three of the drawings sold by her daughter, Marjorie Barton, many years ago.  Despite that, Goldmark at Uppingham in Rutland still have drawings for sale. These three are amongst them and they probably represent some of the best drawings left you can still buy.

But Goldmark is not all there is to it. Those of you who cannot leave ebay alone will also know that there are more drawings there being sold by a long-time Royds dealer in Nottinghamshire. It may sound incredible but all the drawings you see here and the ones on ebay were part of the same horde that Marjorie Barton sold about 1984 when interest in colour woodcut was taking off.

Royds is not for the faint-hearted and I decided against using one of the Goldmark here in case e-blogger slapped a warning on Modern Printmakers. She was a great colourist as we all know, vibrant, subtle, uncompromising. She also had a powerful drawing style which increased in drama as art deco took hold. She was possibly the first woman to make male nudes (more or less) and I suspect this has not always helped some of the Indian prints to sell.

Anyway, you can buy any of these for less than you will pay for a print. If you can find one, that is.

Road to the isles: Helen G Stevenson & Norma Bassett Hall

 

On 16th June, 1925, the American artist, Norma Bassett Hall arrived in Glasgow after sailing by ship from the United States with her husband, Arthur William Hall. The Halls immediately travelled on to Edinburgh to meet Mabel Royds and Ernest Lumsden who had respectively distinguished themselves as a colour woodcut artist and an etcher. Lumsden's The art of etching had only just been published in London and Philadelphia and since 1919 Royds was had been working on a series of woodcuts of India that remain unique in modern British printmaking to this day.

It goes without saying the Halls believed they had something to gain by coming so far and that Edinburgh might be an important staging-post in their common journey as artists. During their honeymoon in 1922, the Halls had put together Some prints of Cannon Beach  in book form. (I was under the impression these were linocuts though Jody Patterson in her book about Bassett Hall only describes them as block prints.) While William concentrated on etching after that, Bassett Hall read Frank Morley Fletcher's Woodblock printing and began making colour woodcuts in the way that he described.

This is the story that has been told about the journey, but looking at it with a dash of scepticism and a good deal of hindsight, it is difficult to see what the young artist from Oregon and the unconventional upper class Englishwoman might have in common apart from an interest in colour woodcut. Royds had attended at least three art schools, she had relatives living variously in manor houses in Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire, Allington Hall in West Derby, Liverpool, and a castle in Co. Louth, she had travelled widely, she was on the staff at Edinburgh College of Art, she had lived in Paris, she belonged to a fairly bohemian circle of friends and, more decisively, she had no interest in landscape or in depicting the country she had lived in for nearly twenty years. Hall, on the other hand, came from the backwoods and could tell a mean story by way of mountains, trails and trees. Or at least that is what she began to do once she and Arthur had taken the road to the isles.

In mid-August the Halls spent a week at Portree on the Isle of Skye and going by prints that she made after their return to the United States like A Highland croft (below, 1927 - 28) and Croft at Crianlarich (sixth image down, 1928 -29) they stopped off in Perthshire on the way to Skye. Hall made only four Highland prints, the other two being Portree Bay (seventh image down 1929) and Cottage in Skye (eighth down, 1941 - 42).  All of them prominently feature crofts like the ruined one above in Lochranza (1927) but none of them include a lonely tower. Highland redoubts, like the one in Lochranza, were prominent in the work of Helen Stevenson who understood that a ruin and a castle so often meant clearance of people from the land and emigration.

When the Halls arrived in Scotland, Stevenson had been teaching art for three years and had exhibited probably no more than half a dozen colour woodcuts. During her first year as a student on the applied art section at Edinburgh College of Art, the designer Charles Paine was head of the department, John Platt took over one year later but no two artists could be less alike than Stevenson and Platt, something that makes the common ground between Stevenson and Bassett Hall more intriguing. Only compare Stevenson's frazzled keyblock and over-printing for the thatch in The hen-wife (second from the top) and Bassett Hall's use of the same techniques in Croft at Crianlarich  and you will see what I mean. And it doesn't stop there. The way Stevenson handled the light and shade on the tree behind the croft is repeated by Bassett Hall. It is always possible that the woman looking down at her hens in Croft at Crianlarich is the same person as Stevenson's hen-wife. No one knows. The fact remains Bassett Hall learned more from Stevenson than she did from Royds.

As a reader has only just commented in an email, Bassett Hall's work could be flat, but her Scottish subjects brought out the best in her and I think the Highland prints are the best things she made. They had an intensity and drama that was beyond the means of Stevenson who would not have had the gable-end of the cottage echoed by the mountain peaks. Stevenson was true to what she saw around her; Hall turned the hen-wife into a frontiers-woman and the Highlands into the Rockie Mountains, substituting a feeling for place with an uplifting message. Hall could be samey. There were too many shacks, too many trails, too many mountains and after a while you are not sure whether she is in Oregon or Provence.  There are not just too many different places, there are too many influences, including the engravings of Noel Rooke and the colour woodcut arches of Elizabeth York Brunton.

This is something you could never say about Stevenson. From early on, the Appin Peninsula, Argyll and its islands were the main focus of her work. England appears only once in Bamburgh Castle and Edinburgh twice in Edinburgh Castle  and Braid Burn. The burn was not far from her home in Morningside, but nearness didn't make it into a better print. Both were some of the weakest things she ever did. In this respect, she is the Highland Boxsius, a holiday artist who needed to get away from her job as an art teacher. Boxsius was a Londoner and occasionally depicted London with sensitivity. Stevenson reinvented herself in Argyll. She took what she had learned about poster design, illustration and stained glass from Paine and Platt, and turned it to good advantage. This was exactly the kind of training Hall never had and that no amount of visiting Edinburgh or the Central School or St. Paul de Vence would quite make up for. Her only consolation was the Highlands and her Highland guide.

Edinburgh School

The one thing I did not want to do in the last post was to give the wrong impression about Mabel Royds herself. I suspect the reason she was willing to help Norman Bassett Hall was because she had always learned from other artists throughout her own working life. But then there are so many misconceptions about Royds, it is hard to know where to begin. But one person that was right about her was Malcolm Salaman when he described her work as synthetic. It was not only a matter of how much she assimilated from other artist, there was also something premeditated about her use of colour.

                                                                             
The Indian notebooks are also misleading. It has also struck me as odd that notebooks that were sometimes ten or more years old could provide the basis for new work. But you only need to compare Elizabeth York Brunton's colour woodcut 'The pergola' from 1922 and Royd's 'The musicians' from 1927 to see how far Royds could synthesise her drawings made in India and work made by her contemporaries after she had returned.

Royds and her husband had moved back to Edinburgh in 1919 while York Brunton had been born there and had trained at Edinburgh College of Art amongst other places (but almost certainly before it became a college under Frank Morley Fletcher in 1907). Like Royds (who was six years older) she had also trained in Paris and had spent time working there. She was a sculptor-printmaker like Eric Gill and to a lesser extent Robert Gibbings. She had a strong interest in structure, texture and light. Her prints are far from technically perfect and often have a scrappy look to them but they were also spontaneous and exploratory and again I suspect this was what attracted Royds who after all was quite a literary and cerebral artist. But then York Brunton was no slouch herself when it came to lifting ideas from others. Take a look at William Giles' 'At eventide, Rothenburg am Tauber' from about 1905.
                                                                               

Giles had a wayward originality and commitment to his trade that was beyond the reach of many artists and York Brunton's inclusion of his outlandish orange rooftops in her own print shows exactly the kind of example he had set for artists who were making colour prints. His work is seminal, it is as simple as that. I had always assumed that York Brunton had used a French subject for her print. Looking at the all together for the first time, I can't really avoid the coming to the conclusion that her woodcut shows Rothenburg as well! She did work in Germany as well, after all. What is fascinating is the way the combination of deviant purple and warm sand was first transferred by York Brunton into her own woodcut then taken up by Royds along with Brunton's use of shadow.

All this strikes me as productive and not at all inbred. All three prints have something different to offer us. York Brunton's may be the weakest but it also has the kind of nonchalance and vigour we have come to expect from good modern prints. Royds' woodcut was masterly in a more obvious way. The use of western conventions - the sense of light and space and the study of the human figure - are plainly obvious. Less apparent is the subtle use of double framing to enhance the intimacy of the scene and her constant sense of crowded space was perhaps never bettered than it was here. Giles' print is of course superb printmaking. No British artist, before or since, did it quite like him. Beyond that, the imagination was at work. It's those quirky white railings that give away how fascinated he was by what he saw but the way he re-imagined those things. If Royds synthesised then as someone once said about Giles, he transposes his feelings.

 

 

 

Mabel Royd's 'Globe artichoke ' and 'Waterfall'

One or two woodcuts here by Mabel Royds that readers may not know. I posted the version of 'Waterfall' in 'Mabel Royds at her best' but now have this stunning image for comparison. I particularly like the greens and blues and glassiness of the water. This looks like Scotland without actually saying so. It dates from 1938.

Also from the late thirties, this unusual globe artichoke. It's not often she goes for such tactile subjects as she does here with the water and the flower head. These are very much late works and seem to concentrate very much on the subject.

I include a version of her magnolias which is from the mid-thirties and finds her in oriental mode, beautifully inked and subtle in its symbolism.

Mabel Royds: at her best

A reader kindly sent me some prints by Mabel Royds (1874- 1941) not long ago and as I knew that readers would enjoy them, here they are. Some are rarely seen and others I have never seen myself. I like them all so it's a personal choice but once I had the images you see here all together, I noticed for the first time how well she uses both black and white. Looking at them, you would scarcely believe I didn't intend to make a point. The use of white as a form of negative space where she has chosen white subjects like goats, cyclamens or lilies shows by just how much she considered what she was doing in her prints. There is none of the usual recourse to snow - even at its most subtle as we've seen with Paul Leschhorn. What, of course, she does do is take a close look and crop the image quite severely, giving all of them - even the French genre scene of the girl leaning over the fence - a quite abstract feel. It shows by just how much abstraction was an underlying theme even with representational artists. Another notable feature is her sense of rhythm and pattern. There is nothing showy about these images. They are as well-thought-out as they are understated and I think you can see exactly why she became a teacher. Here is someone who is as much in control as the girl is with the goat. So far as that image goes, I particularly like the way the girl and the animal face different ways but that she connects them with the pattern made by the fence. She relates them with considerable care, one as tied as the other. One daydreams while the other eats. This is quite some way from the standard farmyard scene.

Her admiration for the workmanship and activity of the people of India is translated here into great craftsmanship of her own. She presented the Indians in her prints as busy people, absorbed in what they are doing. The sense of slowly opening flowers - specially these lilies - may put us in mind of the underlying symbolism of oriental life. But she never tries too hard and perhaps she is barely conscious of it herself. Although I prefer the later prints, I still now think the flower woodcuts of the 1930s very much follow on from the Indian work of the 1920s.

One reader had already made a request for the waterlilies and hopefully this image is satisfactory! I found myself almost taking the texture of the print for granted but it is quite unusual - it looks like a linocut the way she has printed it. Her brushwork doesn't really show up on any photo but thank you once again to John Shillito who provided all of these.

The how & why of Mabel Royds (1874 - 1941)

It is sometimes said that Mabel Royds 'studied under Tonks at the Slade'. This may well be true, or it may be a factoid. But what it roughly means is this: Henry Tonks (1862 - 1937) a surgeon turned artist took charge of the reknowned life-class at the Slade School of Art in London in 1893, and it was this life-class that was to have a lasting effect on the work of Royds.






At the Slade she learned to draw; their new emphasis was on rapidity, the training of memory, study of the old masters and drawing from life and Royds kept up the habits she had acquired at art school, making studies in oils, like this one of Benares, and carrying her sketchpad everywhere from Tangier to Tibet. And I think this helps to explain why her prints were so accomplished - she may not have been a brilliant draughtswoman but she could draw.

At the Slade she had learned how to construct a drawing and build up its tones but as with so many of her talented contemporaries, she then went to Paris. There is the influence of Toulouse Lautrec in this early colour woodcut of the circus but very few people applied the experience of the life-class so directly to their prints. The image of extension, of her subjects making their way across the whole picture plane, is also one that is dominant in alot of her work.

After teaching in Canada, in 1911 she went to work at Edinburgh College of Art where Frank Morley Fletcher was director. She worked alongside the painters SJ Peploe and JD Fergurson and in 1913 married another teacher, the etcher ES Lumsden. On their honeymoon they travelled to Paris, Florence, Rome and Bombay via Port Said. Her Indian colour woodcuts date from a later stay.

Following the outbreak of war, Lumsden was rejected by the British Army and the couple left Edinburgh and returned to India where he was accepted by the Indian Army. The colour woodcuts she later produced depend on the copious drawings and sketches she made as they travelled in India and Tibet. But behind it all, we still see the effects of that life-class, whether it was Alphonse Legros or Henry Tonks that taught her. (Legros, a thorough-going draughtsman, would have been professor there if she had attended in her mid teens, around 1880).

Childhood is an underlying and often subtle theme - the circus, for instance. Sometimes there are direct studies of her daughter Marjorie, born just before they left India, or we have episodes from the life of Christ. Her urgent 'Flight into Egypt' is one, the ominous carpenter's workshop is another.

Wherever you look, it is the muscularity of things and the underlying structures that move her. Her sense of colour and the glamorous application of paint, particularly in her the later flower prints (1933 - 1938), would be nowhere near as effective without them.

The Indian series date from 1920 to 1930 but probably most people's preference is for that final glorious series. No reproduction does them justice. Attractive as the jug of flowers is below, the sheer freshness and vitality of her foxgloves and waning tulips, once she has applied the paint, is quite unlike anything else in British printmaking.

There are not many artists or writers to find a convincing lyricism later in life and the prints are all the more exceptional for that.

Henry Tonks once advised a student to spend less time looking at Aubrey Beardsley's 'Yellow Book' and more time in the National Gallery. I'm not sure which book Mabel Royds had been looking at when she made this print of magnolias but it breathed life and colour, that's for sure.

I need to credit William P Carl Fine Prints in the US for the print of tulips (it is sold) and the Goldmark Gallery at Uppingham in the UK for the three paintings.

Frank Morley Fletcher: Woodblock Printing, 1916

Probably the closest any of us of very modest means will get to owning a colour woodcut like this one is a copy of Morley Fletcher's small handbook, Woodblock Printing. Not only was Morley Fletcher (1866 - 1949) a superb printmaker, for many years he also had a successful teaching career based on his practical knowledge of woodblock printing in the Japanese manner. Beginning with classes at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts, he progressed to University College, Reading where Allen Seaby (1867 - 1953) was also a teacher. 1907 to 1923 saw him director of Edinburgh College of Art where both Mabel Royds (1874 - 1941) and John Platt (1866 - 1947) were on the staff. In 1916 John Hogg published the first edition of his primer.

If you can find a copy of the book for sale, you also acquire this small print because it was included as an exemplar in each copy. The book was so successful it was reprinted by Pitman with the print below acting as exemplar. Interestingly enough, this second edition includes advertisements for pigments and tools. I can only assume the first book had had an effect. Fletcher left Edinburgh in 1924 to take up the post of first school director of the School of the Arts at Santa Barbara. He stayed there till 1930.

And just in case anyone should doubt a student could learn a technique as complex as Japanese woodcut from a handbook, Steven Hutchins, a dealer specialising in Japanese woodblock prints, once did exactly that. He also produced two very passable prints. A good deal is also made of Morley Fletcher's innovations and while I don't wish to belittle his significant work as a teacher, Emil Orlik went to Japan to study printmaking at the same time that Fletcher and John Dixon Batten (1860 - 1932) were experimenting in London. (Orlik's early career is summarised in an October posting). Unlike FMF, he didn't make a career out of woodcut but dropped them before the first war - Orlik was also a wonderful portrait etcher. Either you have it or you don't.