Stanley Royle

His election to associate member of the Royal Society of British Artists (RSBA)[1] in 1918 indicated his increasing importance as a landscape painter.

Living in an outlying rural district with limited public transport did not prevent Stanley Royle from undertaking large canvasses of landscapes, as shown by his study Burbage Valley (Museums Sheffield).

This work had been attributed to the artist William Leech, until Jean Royle, his daughter, sold her painting Spring Morning Amongst the Bluebells in 1992.

[1] His success as a painter made it possible for the family to move to a newly built house at Park Head Crescent in Ecclesall and by 1930, he co-founded the Sheffield Print Club.

For several years he had privately taught a pupil named Elizabeth Styring Nutt who had become the Principal of the Nova Scotia College of Art, Canada.

She visited Britain each summer,[7] and eventually persuaded Royle to emigrate in December 1931, with his wife and daughter, to take up a post as a lecturer in painting there (the "Great Depression" had made it next to impossible for him to make a living in the England).

Throughout his years in Canada, he returned frequently to Europe during the long summer vacations, where he conducted painting tutorials on the Isle of Sark, and in Dorset and Derbyshire.

Stanley Royle became a full member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1942[9][10] and in 1945, he and his wife returned to the UK where he sojourned with his daughter and family in Suffolk before settling in north Nottinghamshire.

Many of his paintings emphasise the sky by making use of a low horizon, so Suffolk, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire provided ideal subjects.

On his return he acquired a motorbike and had removable carriers built for the pillion seat to accommodate his canvasses and paint box.

[12] During this decade he visited Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall and again Brittany as he found the lighting effects of maritime subjects particularly inspiring.

[7] Stanley Royle had a full and academic knowledge of every aspect of painting and an ability to capture the atmospheric quality of natural lighting on the landscape.

He thought nothing of pitching his easel in the middle of a stream and standing knee deep in water, whatever the weather, if that gave him the view he wanted to capture.

In conjunction with the 1988 centenary travelling exhibition held in Canada, Patrick Condon Laurette, the Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, published a book in 1989 titled Stanley Royle (1888–1961).

His publication explores the work and relationships of Sheffield's Canadian Artists which included Arthur Lismer and Frederick Varley as well as Stanley Royle.