Born in 1888 in Lancashire, Stanley Royle was a highly accomplished post-Impressionist painter whose works are most notable for their evocative sense of light. As a boy, he was influenced by his elder cousin Herbert Royle (1870 – 1958) who was already an established painter, and under his encouragement Stanley attended Sheffield Technical School of Art from 1904 – 1908, and after receiving a scholarship extended his tutorship until 1910. Shortly after he began exhibiting professionally, with his first success coming in 1913 with three of his paintings, including Spring Morning Amongst the Bluebells, being accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where he continued to exhibit intermittently throughout his career.

In 1920 he was elected a full member of the Royal Society of British Artists. The following year he painted one his most beautiful works, The Goose Girl. Housed in the National Gallery of Ireland collection, it was mistakenly attributed to the celebrated post-Impressionist Irish painter, William Leech (1881-1968) – a testament to its quality, it was only correctly re-attributed in 1992.

Royle received his first major commission in 1922 to paint four large views of Sheffield and today housed in Museums Sheffield. One of these works, Sheffield from Wincobank Wood was included in the Tate Britain's exhibition A Picture of Britain in 2005. In the 1930s, Royle moved to Canada to teach at the Novia Scotia College of Art - the beginning of an informative association with the country. He subsequently became Director of the Owens Art Museum and College of Art, a post he held for ten years. He painted some of his finest works in Canada, the wild landscape and light particularly attuned to his sensibilities.

Royle returned to the Britain in 1945 where he remained until his death in 1961. He continued to paint actively and in 1950 was elected president of the Sheffield Society of Artists. He also travelled to Brittany where the maritime subjects proved especially inspiring. Two of his works were recognised with honours at the Paris Salon.

Painting en plein air, Royle embraced the Impressionist principles of responding to light with pure colour and broken brushwork. He often adopted a low horizon line giving prominence to a light-filled and dynamic foreground landscapes, as we see in Laundry Day, here dappled with bluebells. Bluebells were another favoured motif of Royle seen in some of his most successful works, such as The Goose Girl and Spring Morning Amongst the Bluebells.

Light was Royle’s forte, capturing its effects throughout the seasons. Snow was a particularly favoured subject on account of the fluxes and challenges it presented. His preference was to work when the sun was low in the sky for its more dramatic effects, which in the present work reflects off the golden walls of the farm building, breaks along the path and picks out a figure on the right-hand side. The blocks of colour depicting the laundry punctuate the work and give a further accent to the overall composition. Royle gave paramount importance to the construction of his painting, and outlined his approach explaining: “My first consideration, in painting the finished picture, is design. Everything really depends on this first planning of the basic rhythms”.

Examples by Royle are relatively rare, and Laundry Day stands as one his best examples. His paintings are found in public collections including Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, the Derby Art Gallery, the Glasgow Museum, National Galler of Canada and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.