Knife Grinder

Mabel Allington Royds

By the time Mabel Royds learned the art of color woodcut she was already an accomplished painter and etcher with over three decades of experience under belt, having studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London beginning at age fifteen as well as private instruction in Paris and teaching art in Toronto, Canada. However, once she discovered the medium, learning from Frank Morley Fletcher after taking a position at the University of Edinburgh in 1911, it became her primary medium.

Travels to India, the Middle East, and in Tibet proved a great source of inspiration for Royds, and in “The Knife Grinder” we see the combination of her early life experience culminate in one image: the delicacy of her line; the painterly color brushed onto the block rather than rolled; the layout of the composition like a story being told, yet whose narrative is created by the viewer’s imagination.