Peggy’s Cove, 1939 by Stanley Royle

Stanley Royle was born in 1888 in Stalybridge, Lancashire, and studied art at the Sheffield Technical School of Art. He worked as an illustrator for various local newspapers before exhibiting semi-professionally in London for the first time in 1911. The following year he exhibited at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool. In 1913 he had three works accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy, the maximum number for a non - Academician. He continued to have works accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy on a regular basis throughout the course of his career showing a total of thirty-nine works there.

Royle married in 1914 and, in 1916, he moved with his family to rural Sheffield where they lived in a house overlooking the Mayfield valley, an area that featured largely in his work at the time. He became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1921. He emigrated to Canada in the 1930s where he took up a teaching position at the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax. Later, teaching at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, he influenced young artists such as Alex Colville. Royle was a disciple of anti-modernist, realist trends, an interest shared by Colville, who today credits him as a strong influence on his own career. Royle was to spend the next fourteen years dividing his time between there and England. His first Canadian paintings were exhibited in London at the Royal Academy in 1933. Other galleries that he frequently submitted works to were the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, and the Walker Gallery, Liverpool. He also exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and the Royal Institute of Painters in Oils.