Lot 128
Estimate: £20,000 - £30,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 103-196 | Thursday 05 December from 6pm
Signed and dated '94, oil on canvas
33cm x 28cm (13in x 11in)
Visitors to late-19th-century Japan resided in designated European ‘Concession’ areas, segregated from natives. This frustrated the ambitions of the young Glasgow painters Edward Atkinson Hornel and George Henry, who had voyaged to Japan in February 1893 eager to ‘see and study the environment out of which [Japan’s] great art sprung, to become personally in touch with the people, to live their life, and discover the source of their inspiration.’ Buchanan, W., Mr Henry and Mr Hornel Visit Japan, exh. cat., Glasgow Art Gallery 1978, p.9) The intrepid artists had no option but to take to the streets of Tokyo, Nagasaki and Yokohama armed only with a keen eye for authentic detail and drawing materials with which to note them down (see Billcliffe, R., The Glasgow Boys, Frances Lincoln, London, 2008, p.259).
Hornel’s Japanese canvases retain the immediacy of a sketch. He frequented the tearooms in Tokyo’s Shinbashi quarter, recording the particulars of a geisha’s posture, the design of a kimono or the pattern of a painted screen. However, contrary to the Glasgow Boys’ propensity for naturalistic en plein air composition, Hornel re-configured these observed components to highly decorative effect. Japan intensified his surface texture and colouration, and he renders the titular Geisha Girl with the same attention he affords the pattern and tonal values of the painted screen behind her, so that the foreground and background infuse into a single shimmering decorative plane. The Geisha Girl’s warm jewel tones are characteristic of Hornel’s early works; as he matured his palette cooled, giving way to fresh, airy blues and greens such as those in Blossom-Time, Sailing the Toy Boat or A Woodland Elf also presented here.
The Geisha Girl dates to 1894 and was either painted while Hornel was still in Japan or shortly after he had returned to Scotland. Its date makes possible its inclusion in the artist’s lauded exhibition of around 40 Japanese pictures held in April 1895 at Alexander Reid’s gallery in Glasgow. Owing to Hornel’s habit of neglecting to title his work, and the absence of a surviving catalogue, few details about this show survive. However, it is known that it was a runaway success, and that almost every picture sold. (Buchanan, W., op.cit., p.13)
It was the popularity of Japanese art in Glasgow that had inspired Henry and Hornel to make the extraordinary voyage to the other side of the world. Through Hornel’s acute observation and Henry’s contact with Japanese exemplars, both artists achieved their objective of better understanding the society that had produced the prints and designs they had so admired in Scotland. Japan had enriched each artists’ output indelibly.