Lot 24: Stanley Royle RBA ARWA (1888-1961) IN THE POTATO FIELDS, ECCLESFIELD, EARLY EVENING, 1913

signed and dated lower right

h:18 w:27.75in.

watercolour and gouache

In 1893 Stanley Royle's family moved from Stalybridge, Cheshire to Ecclesfield, a rural outlying district of Sheffield in South Yorkshire where his father became the stationmaster at Ecclesfield railway station.

Royle's elder cousin, Herbert - already a highly successful landscape painter - encouraged him to pursue a career in painting. He gained a scholarship to the Sheffield Technical School of Art in 1908 and began exhibiting professionally three years later. Three of his paintings were accepted by the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1913 - the year the present work was painted - and a prestigious commission from Frederick Horner, a local art dealer, to paint four large views in oils of Sheffield, followed in 1922. Royle and his family emigrated to Canada in the 1930s. There he taught at the Nova Scotia School of Art and later at the Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. In 1936 he was made an Associate Member of the Royal Canadian Academy, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia hold one of the largest public collections of his work. He returned to Britain in 1945 and continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy and was elected president of the Sheffield Society of Artists in 1950. The Paris Salon awarded him the Silver Medal in 1951 and the Gold Medal in 1955. During this decade Royle visited Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall and Brittany.

Perhaps the best-known example of Royle's work in Ireland is the controversial The Goose Girl, c.1924 in the National Collection, Dublin which had originally been attributed to Irish artist William Leech.

ANTIQUE

FIGURATIVE