EDWARD HORNEL | Two Young Girls Picking Flowers
Oil on Canvas
40.5 x 51 cms / 16 x 20 inches
Signed (lower right)
Edward Atkinson Hornel’s Two Young Girls Picking Flowers embodies the artist’s distinctive blend of naturalism and decorative colour. Set against a sweeping coastal backdrop, the scene depicts two girls absorbed in gathering wild blooms, their forms harmonising with the richly textured foreground. Hornel’s vigorous brushwork and layered impasto create a tapestry-like surface, where tones of cream, rose and green shimmer in the light. This composition reflects his enduring fascination with childhood, nature and the rhythmic beauty of the Scottish landscape.
Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864–1933) was a Scottish painter and a central figure in the group known as the Glasgow Boys, whose work helped redefine British painting at the turn of the twentieth century. Born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia, Hornel moved with his family to Kirkcudbright, Scotland, in 1866. He studied at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh before continuing his training in Antwerp under Charles Verlat, where he absorbed the naturalism and tonal discipline that shaped his early style.
By the late 1880s Hornel had joined the progressive circle of the Glasgow Boys, alongside George Henry, Joseph Crawhall, and James Guthrie. Rejecting academic conventions, they favoured bold colour, decorative surface patterns and subjects drawn from rural life. Hornel’s work from this period, such as The Druids: Bringing in the Mistletoe (1890), demonstrates his interest in symbolism and Celtic revival themes.
A pivotal collaboration with George Henry on a two-year painting tour of Japan (1893–94) transformed his palette and approach. Hornel incorporated Japanese compositional devices, decorative flatness, and vibrant colour harmonies into his subsequent paintings, which often featured young girls in richly patterned gardens or woodland settings. These works, with their combination of figuration and ornament, became his signature style and enjoyed considerable commercial success.
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