Stanley Royle, Sheffield’s finest painter
Links to:
- "My Attitude to Painting" .... by Stanley Royle
- "Biography of Stanley Royle" .... by his grand daughter Lucy Copleston
- "An appraisal of Stanley Royle's painting" .... by his grand daughter Anthea Copleston
- "Stanley Royle, Sheffield’s finest painter" .... by archivist Timothy Dickson
'Sheffield from Crookes' 1923
There are few twentieth-century British artists who are synonymous with just one place. Obvious examples are Stanley Spencer and idyllic Cookham and L. S. Lowry and industrial Manchester. Today, Stanley Royle and the City of Sheffield is considered by many as another such artist. His best works are an enduring testament to his love and understanding of the great city and its surroundings, whether they are his panoramas of its industrial heart or the wide-open moorland that cradle it. He remains very much ‘a Sheffield painter’ despite the fact that he spent his most productive years working away from the city. Strangely, he neglected to inform most people he wasn’t actually born in Sheffield; he was, in fact, born in another county entirely, although he always called Sheffield his ‘home’.
'Ploughing' 1920
Sheffield has eloquently been described as ‘the largest village in England’ and more pertinently, ‘an ugly picture set in a beautiful frame’. Both of these statements would have rung true to Royle. He is seen as a quintessentially English post-impressionist; his most appealing pictures are those he painted throughout the 1920’s and early 1930’s. It is in these works in particular that he embraces wider social issues including the preservation of our rural landscape and historic buildings. He shares a sense of place, whether it is in his rural English landscapes or the vibrancy of his Canadian works produced during the 1930’s and 1940’s in which he demonstrates his direct and acute visual sense and wonderful ability to translate the landscape onto canvas.
'The Bluebell Wood' 1931
His finest works, whether they are pencil drawings, pastels, watercolours or oil paintings all evoke the vastness of an unspoilt landscape with extreme delicacy and accomplished draughtsmanship. His understanding of how to communicate the feeling and atmosphere of a particular time and place are unsurpassed.
'The Old Wheatsheaf' 1929
He is able to transcribe perfectly a fleeting moment; that of a field of bluebells, the sun setting over heather covered moors, dappled sunlight on snow or even the end of the day at harvest time.
'Sunset, Burbage Moor' 1923
Thankfully we have been left with over seven hundred works spanning a career of fifty years. As his artistic career was split between two continents, it has been extremely difficult to assess the body of work he left. In fact, after his death in 1961 his work received scant attention. It was not until his studio sale at Christie’s in London (1987) and a major Canadian exhibition (1988 ) that his work was seen again by the general public and favourably re-assessed. Over the last two decades there has been a re-evaluation of key artists working between the two world wars, which has coincided with a renewed interested in Stanley Royle and his work.