Collection: Mabel Royds   1872 - 1941 

Mabel Royds was born in Bedfordshire, 1872. When, aged only fifteen, she won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy Schools in London she instead chose to study at the more progressive Slade School, unbeknownst to her parents. After spells in Paris and Toronto from 1900, she returned to Britain in 1911 to teach at the Edinburgh College of Art where her colleagues included the Scottish Colourist painters J.D.Fergusson and S.J.Peploe and the etcher E.S.Lumsden.

Royds married Lumsden in 1913, their honeymoon including travels to Bombay. They returned to India the following year and in 1916 the two of them journeyed through the Himalayas, painting as they went. Throughout the 1920s her prints, nearly always woodcuts, were often of Indian subjects based on images from her travels. Unable to afford pear woodblocks for her woodcuts, she made them instead from sixpenny breadboards from Woolworths. Royds died in Edinburgh, 1941.