Pryde, James

Pryde, James (1866–1941). British painter and designer. He was born in Edinburgh and studied there at the Royal Scottish Academy, 1886–7, and then for three months at the Académie Julian, Paris. In the 1890s he designed posters with his brother-in-law William Nicholson under the name J. & W. Beggarstaff. Pryde sometimes supplemented his income at this time by taking small parts on the stage. As a painter he is best known for dramatic and sinister architectural views, with figures dwarfed by their gloomy surroundings. They have something of the spirit of the prison etchings by the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, but they are broadly brushed, and in the entry on Pryde in the Dictionary of National Biography, Derek Hudson says that they were probably influenced by his ‘early Edinburgh memories—the high-ceilinged, dimly-lit interior of the house [in which he lived] in Fettes Row, the four-poster in Mary Queen of Scots' bedroom at Holyrood, the strings of washing outside the upper windows of the tall tenement buildings off the High Street'. Pryde—‘tall and handsome', but ‘dilatory, extravagant, and unproductive for long periods'—did little after 1925. However, in 1930 he designed the sets for Paul Robeson's memorable Othello at the Savoy Theatre, London.