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Born in Australia, E. A. Hornel immigrated to Kirkcudbright, Scotland, as a young boy. Although he attended art school in Edinburgh and completed his training in Antwerp, he eventually rejoined his parents in Kirkcudbright and became part of a constellation of artists working there during the 1880s and 1890s. The self-described “Glasgow Boys” formed the loosely affiliated Glasgow School that took inspiration from James McNeill Whistler and collectively resisted the dominance of London and Edinburgh over the fin-de-siècle art scene. Hornel formed a particular friendship with George Henry, whose Blowing Dandelions is also in the collection and, like Flower Market, Nagasaki, reflects the group’s tendency to emphasize shape and color over realism, in a manner sympathetic to impressionism and postimpressionism. Hornel traveled with Henry to Japan for eighteen months in 1893–94 and, on unfamiliar ground, continued the close observation of daily life that had provided material for his popular landscape paintings in Scotland.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016