ISSN 1753-9854 AUTUMN 2004
‘The Veriest Poem of Art in Nature’: E. A. Hornel’s Japanese Garden in the Scottish Borders
YSANNE HOLT
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Fig.1 Garden pathway, Broughton House Author’s photograph |
From the 1900s through to the 1920s, the Scots painter Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933) turned increasingly to the cultivation of his antiquarian collection of local literature; folklore, poetry and history; and his walled garden by the banks of the river Dee in the Scottish Border town of Kirkcudbright. Hornel’s one acre garden was designed in sections (some were already in existence): areas of lawn, rose-beds and box hedges, flower and herb gardens (fig.1). But the section deemed most important to the artist himself was, as Stephen Harvey writing for Scottish Field in the 1970s termed it, ‘An Eastern Garden . this was clearly the artist’s own dominion, a place apart from the conventional villa garden, landscaped with exotics to remind Hornel of his travels . It was planted with pink Japanese wind flowers, with flagged paths meandering between clumps of golden maple, Japanese dwarf pines, a lily pond with stepping stones watched over by a lead flamingo, a grove of flowering cherry trees, a magnolia’ 1 (fig.2). All of these derive from mid to late nineteenth-century japonaiserie, but around that collection of oriental plants and accessories, such as stone lanterns, were gathered relics of local origin; meal querns, curling stones, a tiny stone trough (actually an ancient coffin for a young child), an eleventh or twelfth century wayside cross from nearby Dalshangan village and a collection of stones, some decorative or inscribed, purloined from the ruins of nearby Dundrennan Abbey (figs.3 and 4). This favoured section of the garden, this place apart, is in one sense bricolage: objects appropriated, removed, relocated and assigned new meanings. So how might we interpret this ‘Japanese -Scottish’ garden? How might we understand the interrelations here between forms of painting, print-making, illustration and garden design, and what relation might these have to issues of cultural and national identity?
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Fig.2 Pond and stepping stones, Broughton House Author’s photograph |
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Fig.3 Dalshangan Cross, Broughton House Author’s photograph |
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Fig.4 Stones in pathway, Broughton House Author’s photograph |
A native of Kirkcudbright,2
Hornel began work on his garden shortly after his
purchase in 1901 of the rather grand eighteenth-century Broughton House
on the High Street (fig.5). Having grown up in that street in more modest
accommodation, he acquired ‘Bro-Hoose’ at the peak of his professional
career. My contention here is that the aesthetic principles and cultural
preoccupations that informed the design of his garden, extend those of
his artistic practice from the late 1880s. As, from 1901, his paintings
declined steadily into repetition and cliché and were no longer a focus
for his originality, real stimulus came from the creation of an alternative
space - the artist’s garden which we might regard as the material embodiment
of an imagined arcadia over which he could exert his omnipotence and cultivate
his memories. In acquiring and arranging his plant specimens, just as
he accumulated and extended his collection of rare books, the artist projected
his ideal identity, his cultural and aesthetic preferences.
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Fig.5 Broughton House Author’s photograph |
After
an unsatisfactory period at Edinburgh art school from 1880 to 1883, as
Bill Smith’s excellent monograph on the artist relates, Hornel trained
for two years under Charles Verlat at the Antwerp Academy. This, like
the Académie Julian in Paris, was an important focus for many British
students who were disaffected by academic teaching in both England and
Scotland and were soon drawn to forms of rustic naturalism associated
with French painters like Jules Bastien-Lepage and Jean-François Millet
(see fig.6). But Hornel’s trajectory through the late 1880s and
early 1890s was away from the naturalism we associate with representations
of workers in the field towards a more decorative aesthetic as, with his
associates the Glasgow Boys (James Guthrie, E.A.Walton and Joseph Crawhall)
and especially his close working companion George Henry, he was increasingly
exposed to new sources, from Whistler, to Adolphe Monticelli and Japanese
wood-block prints, particularly through the influence of his Glasgow dealer,
Alexander Reid.3 Impressionism, however,
had little impact on Hornel. So whereas a one-time naturalist like Guthrie
soon departed from ‘kail-yard’ paintings for the depiction
of polite middle-class garden tea parties in Helensburgh with a loose,
atmospheric handling (fig.7), Hornel rejected modern leisure scenes of
the type associated with Impressionism. His preferred theme of young girls
cavorting in dense thickets of nature relates rather more to John
Singer Sargent’s painting Carnation,
Lily, Lily, Rose of 1885 (fig.8) but there are significant differences.
Sargent’s scene of children in a Worcestershire garden be-decked
with fashionable Chinese lanterns is, fundamentally, a painting of modern
life, finely balanced between Aestheticism and Impressionism.4
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Fig.6 E. A. Hornel, In the Town Crofts, Kirkcudbright 1885 Private collection |
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Fig.7 James Guthrie, Midsummer 1892 Royal Scottish Academy (Diploma Collection), Edinburgh |
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Fig.8 John Singer Sargent Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose 1885-6 Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1887.  View in Tate Collection |
Hornel
was drawn, instead, to visionary evocations of a universal timelessness:
his children are at one with the rhythms of the natural world. His impasto
technique and intense colour increasingly demonstrated the influence of
late Pre-Raphaelitism, of Rossetti’s
idyllic, fragrant bowers, and more specifically of the French Provençal
painter Adolphe Monticelli whose works, shown in Edinburgh in 1886, conjured
at that time, ‘an enchanted garden’ in which we might ‘breathe
airs blown as from heavy laden flowers’.5
Monticelli’s paintings, like Fête dans le jardin,
with their mosaic-like brushwork and impenetrable surfaces, suggested
to Hornel a discrete and magical world, one only conceivable once superficial
appearances were disrupted, conventional perspective discarded and, increasingly
for him, naturalism eschewed.6 Ideal
unity and coherence was to be established uniquely within the distinct
confines of the picture plane and, later, in the artist’s own garden.
Hornel’s paintings celebrated a Galloway that was magic
and exotic, a disposition that was widely shared by the close of the nineteenth
century. His own fascination for the local folklore was first revealed
in his illustrations to Malcolm Harper’s Bards of Galloway of
1889, a collection of the legend and poetry of a region deemed well fitted
to the ‘poet’s eye and heart’, with its ‘poetic superstitions’, ‘picturesque
glens’ ‘and the venerable relics of antiquity with which its villages
are studded’.8 But
Harper’s closing lament is very familiar: ‘cheap literature, railways,
telegraphs, the bustle and hurry of commerce, a refinement of life and
manners, all mean that the old customs . of the country are fast disappearing’.
Fairies are no longer believed in and ‘the romance has disappeared’. The
‘essence’ of place and character lies in the past.
Hornel and Henry’s The Druids bringing in the Mistletoe,
1890 (fig.9) responded to Harper with an expression of the mystery, the
primitive simplicity of the county and with evident interest in the remnants
of its Celtic past and sacred customs.9
(Hornel was a member of the local Field Naturalists
and Antiquarian Society’, often apparently leading its members away from
the study of birds and butterflies for tours of the surrounding Kirkcudbright
countryside in search of ancient standing stones and cup and ring marks).
The compressed picture space in The Druids, the symbolic motifs,
gold leaf, and the decorative robes demonstrate a knowledge of Celtic
artistic practice and reveal, for John Morrison, that Henry and Hornel
were in the vanguard of the Celtic Revival movement that sought to ‘trace
the true origins of Scots and Scottish culture and to develop a language,
both formal and iconographic that could serve as an archetype for Scottish
art’.10 But that
flattened perspective and asymmetrical composition also suggest the influence
of Japanese prints. Hornel (like Harper) dismissed material reality for
evocations of an ancient local culture but drew on certain formal qualities
of the Japanese print to emphasise those distinctions. And these allusions
to an ancient Scottish past, via characteristics of both Monticelli and
Japonisme, all signified, to him, fantasy and a world of enchantment.
While, as Lindsay Errington suggested, after The Druids Hornel
and Henry no longer pursued the Celtic revival directly in their subject
matter, following Japonisme instead, both of these idealised aesthetic
traditions, it seems to me, manifest themselves in Hornel’s Kirkcudbright
garden.11
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Fig.9 E. A. Hornel and George Henry, The Druids Bringing in the Mistletoe 1890 Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove. |
The supposedly unique characteristics of Celtic culture
and the Celtic temperament continued to inform his practice, but more
obliquely. Hence his interest and that of his close friend Charles Mackie
and dealer Reid in the decorative synthetism, the rhythmic design of Nabis
painters like Paul Sérusier for whom the ‘celticity’ of Brittany was crucial.
12 In The Studio
magazine’s 1895 account of ‘Concarneau as a Sketching Ground’, Brittany
was described as a place where ‘Druidical remains abound and help to keep
alive the old fables and traditions so dear to this poetic race’.13
From the mid-nineteenth century the Celts were ‘variously
constructed as a figure of otherness . irrational, magical, non-scientific,
emotional’ and often, as Malcolm Chapman pointed out, ‘regarded as a healthy
alternative to western rationality’.14
In Hornel a new formal language of high horizons,
steep foregrounds and snaking arabesques was claimed for this re-discovered
culture in works such as The Dance of Spring, 1891 (fig.10),
which, to the critic D. S. MacColl, demonstrated an ability to ‘make an
image out of [nature] and . bring in the element of strangeness ... Messrs
Henry and Hornel give us pastorals from Ayrshire, but they are also pastorals
from Wonderland’.15
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Fig.10 E. A. Hornel, The Dance of Spring 1891 Glasgow Museums: Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove |
At the same time, Pont-Aven synthetists along with
Van Gogh and Hornel would have concurred with accounts in publications
like Siegfried Bing’s journal of the late 1880s, Artistic Japan,
of the Japanese artist as one instinctively attuned to the natural world,
one who, as in an article by Ary Renan on Hokusai, perceives, ‘The world
[as] a great garden in which he plays in innocence, making charming posies
and watching the flight of the butterfly’.16
Hornel’s exposure to aesthetic doctrines like these
ultimately shaped his aesthetic geography. His conceptions of Galloway,
like Sérusier’s of Brittany and Van Gogh’s of Provence are analogous to
idealised western views of Japan. In February 1893 he and Henry, funded
by Reid, set sail for Japan. But Hornel’s perceptions and prejudices -
later revealed in his lecture to a Glasgow audience - oscillated between
rapture and regret. He remembers the country as a lotus land, its people
‘as a large and happy family, clattering along in the sunshine with smiling
faces . to spend the day ‘mid plum or cherry blossom’. Yet ‘the revolution
of 1668’, he declared, ‘swept away for ever the old Japan with its poetry
and romance, investing the country with . the habits and practices of
Birmingham’.17 In
common with other artist visitors such as Mortimer Menpes and Alfred East,
he appreciated the Japanese reverence for nature (‘Nature to them is symbolism
itself’) and their festival times (‘the whole earth [rejoices] in a profusion
of bloom’) but what emerged most powerfully from this account was an obsession
with good and bad taste, with charm and vulgarity - the charm and perfect
taste displayed in Japanese flower arranging, the vulgarity and bad taste
of the West. Hornel hankered after the ‘highest ideals of the Feudal Jap
of old time’, for the present day merchant classes are ‘liars and untrustworthy’.
This class and cultural snobbery extended to his perceptions of Japanese
gardens. He admired the ‘gardens of the wealthy and upper classes . where
miniature lakes and waterfalls with quaint bridges, tiny landscapes with
dwarf pines and shrubs relieved with stone lanterns, take you into fairyland’.
To Hornel the Japanese aesthetic was ‘the greatest
impressionism the world has so far possessed - all useless details are
laid aside’, ‘whereas we have been working too much on the surface, and
in striving to realise Truth have forgotten the spirit’.18
Naturalism, in this context, is aesthetically vulgar
as, in 1901, Mortimer Menpes confirmed, ‘The sense of perfect placing
. All Orientals are more or less possessed of this intuitive sense of
balance . even the "common man" has acquired the scientific placing of
his things . the feeling permeates all classes’.19
But whereas Hornel compared the Japanese favourably
to the European, Menpes addressed himself to the English: ‘Japan might
be said to be as artistic as England is inartistic’. He retold one man’s
account of nature as observed in Surrey: ‘I never saw the lines of a bush
pick up those of a fence with one broad sweep. Nature never behaved like
that in Dorking.’ Nor he argued, did she in Japan, ‘but the Japanese realise
that Nature is an instrument with harmonies to be coaxed out .We want
parks and stags and moorlands, broad expanses of country and huge avenues,
while the Japanese will be content with one exquisite little harmony’.
The central preoccupation here is with issues of taste and anxieties about
shifting class boundaries; national identity is, perhaps, a red herring.
To extend the metaphor of gardening, ‘cultivation’ in both its horticultural
and wider cultural contexts expressed symbolic distinction. For Menpes,
‘Nothing disturbs in a Japanese landscape. It is the harmonic combination
of untouched naturalness and high artistic cultivation’.20
Hornel’s first thirteen-month trip to Japan (he went
back in the 1920s) was an exercise in pursuing scenes of picturesque authenticity
and avoiding or editing out the aesthetically undesirable - evidence of
Japanese modernity. For the most part, as Bill Smith records, the artists
remained in the area around the treaty ports of Tokyo and Yokohama, sketching
in parks and tea gardens that were later used in compositions like A
Japanese Garden, 1894 (fig.11). Ayako Ono has demonstrated the extent
to which these compositions were closely reliant on albums of hand-tinted
prints created specifically for tourists, depicting geishas in tea ceremonies,
dancing or posing in gardens amongst the chrysanthemums.21
As with earlier Galloway compositions, the artist
here mingles certain elements of the Japanese print, a use of perspective
in particular, with much denser brushwork, brilliant colour and a more
intense, all-over decorative quality still derived from Monticelli. Although
his pictures draw inspiration from a supposedly Japanese attitude to nature,
they share little of a formal, compositional approach.
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Fig.11 E. A. Hornel, A Japanese Garden 1894 Sheila MacNicol |
Hornel’s forty-four Japanese pictures were a sell-out
(save for one) at Reid’s Glasgow gallery La Société des Beaux-Arts in
April 1895. The reviews scrapbook kept at Broughton House contains notices
from the Glasgow press comparing him favourably with painters like Alfred
East and Alfred Parsons who also visited Japan around this period but
who were content to be pretty in an ‘Anglo-Japanese way [whereas Hornel]
has brought to the Orient two singularly strong natural qualities - a
Celtic passion for romance, and a revelling sense of colour’.22
In 1908 James Caw’s Scottish Painting Past and
Present contrasted the paintings with the restrained art of Japan:
‘The colour was as enchanting as an Arabian Night’s tale, as brilliant
as a parrot house, as varied as a flower-garden.’ 23
It was through qualities such as these, Richard Muther
was also to confirm, that ‘the Scotch nourished the modern longing for
mystical worlds of beauty’.24
All of the national and cultural stereotypes considered
so far - of Scottish art as innately decorative and unworldly, of the
Japanese artist in an essential harmony with nature and of a Pan-Celticism
(intuitive, romantic, spiritual) that extended beyond Scotland to a special
identification with Pont Aven synthetistes - culminate in interesting
ways in the Scots naturalist and city planner Patrick Geddes’s short-lived
journal The Evergreen published in Edinburgh between 1895-6.
25 This contained
illustrations of Breton subjects by the Scots artist Robert Brough, of
Celtic heroines and heroes by the Scots symbolist John Duncan, of dancing
girls in gardens and natural landscapes by Charles Mackie, who also designed
the ‘Tree of Life’ cover for the journal. Hornel himself made an appearance
in the second issue, The Book of Autumn, in 1895, with a line
drawing of a Japanese geisha gazing across an ornamental garden (fig.12)
Its title, Madame Chrysanthème, refers to Pierre Loti’s influential
novel of 1888, which did much to inform the view of European artists like
Van Gogh of Japan as a simple, organic, primitive country. Hornel’s Japanese
lecture had described the rhythm of the seasons there, of flowers after
flowers, all culminating in the ‘regal and imperial chrysanthemum’, emphasising
(as did Geddes) the fundamental importance of the cycle of nature. For
Geddes himself, in that same issue, ‘the seasons determine labour, the
family and the very structure of society, posing a problem for the ‘modern
Troglodytes’ in their ‘smoky labyrinths’ in the city. The intuitive artist’s
role in all of this is simply to perfect his ‘fantasias of reveries’.
‘Our new Merlins’, he wrote, ‘thus brighten our winter with their gardens
of dream.’ In the artist’s perception of the progress of the seasons -
from the seasonal decay of rotting compost to the growing seed of a new
life - lay the regeneration of the ‘Individual and of the Race’. In his
biological mysticism Geddes was continually intent on a unity of art and
science, of which gardening was a prime example. ‘Il faut cultiver son
jardin’ he declares - inevitably, perhaps.26
This was exactly what Hornel was poised to do.
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Fig.12 E. A. Hornel, Madame Chrysanthème in The Evergreen |
Shortly
after the success of his Japanese exhibition, Hornel
reverted to depictions of Galloway children in nature, for example, In
the Orchard (City Art Gallery, Edinburgh) or Tate’s Autumn,
1904 (fig.13). However, he maintained the same picturesque low viewpoints
and animated surfaces that intertwine the local girls within the blossoming
orchard and garden scenery. The physical space his Japanese garden occupied
is small and densely planted with, as a result, a claustrophobic quality.
There is no possibility here of a bird’s eye view or a commanding
perspective. To stand back is to risk falling into the lily pond or the
stream (fig.14). The experience of actually being in the garden, surrounded
by dense foliage, is rather like that of looking at one of Hornel’s
low perspective paintings of garden motifs. The only missing ingredient
in this magical, self-sufficient world is that self-absorbed group of
young girls. And that eschewal of distance in the painting, matches the
artist’s own growing absorption in his local social space, increasingly
divorced from the wider art world.
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Fig.13 E. A. Hornel Autumn 1904 Tate View in Tate Collection |
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Fig.14 Pond and yucca, Broughton House Author’s photograph |
From this point Hornel photographed his models in the
specially designed studio at Broughton House, later filling in the backgrounds
with studies of foliage from the garden or settings from local woodland
or nearby Brighouse Bay. His palette became steadily less vibrant and
the works have little of the rhythmic vitality of those from the late
1880s and 1890s. As the relationship with Alexander Reid came to an end
around 1909, Hornel devoted more attention to his house and garden and
increasingly became a leading, paternalist figure about the town. So when
E. Rimbault Dibdin came to Kirkcudbright to write about Hornel’s ‘Paintings
of Children and Flowers’ for The Studio in 1907, he described
first the artist’s ‘fine old house’, ‘set in a large old garden’, and
noticed that, ‘All about his doors are the children of the poor, [many
his red-headed young models] . His garden is full of flowers, and the
flowers of humanity are free to come in from the street [through the side
gate] and enjoy themselves in it. He meanwhile studies and paints them,
the flowers and the children, in the open air’.27
Geddes’s Merlin perhaps in his garden of dream?
The dream, of course, was not conjured from the air
but from continual research and planning. Hornel’s library contains an
interesting array of titles from around 1907-12. In among works on Japanese
art, such as Laurence Binyon’s The Flight of the Dragon (1911)
and local archaeological texts, such as Druidism Exhumed, are
copies of seed catalogues from the Yokahama nursery: titles like Lilies
of Japan, Japanese Species of Bamboo, books on iris and peony cultivation,
plus an album of 95 Photographs of Japanese Tea Rooms and Gardens.
Up to 1910 at least there were successive publications of manuals and
‘how to’ books on Japanese garden design for the European market. The
most significant and scholarly perhaps was the architect and renowned
Japoniste, Josiah Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan, first
published in 1892. As Azby Brown comments, coupled with the photographs
of particular types of garden, such as tea gardens (‘with the character
of wildness and sequestered solitude’), stone gardens, imperial gardens
and so on, Conder’s book contained enough information to enable a designer
in the West to create a replica.28
As Brown suggests, Conder is at core an Orientalist,
‘interpreting an Asian culture, even packaging it for consumption on behalf
of Westerners who might like to partake of its perceived exoticism without
directly engaging its people’.29
Conder’s primary concern in his preface was to clarify the abstract aesthetic
principles of the Japanese garden which lay beneath their ‘quaint and
unfamiliar aspect’ and which might, he believed, be applied to the gardens
of any country. The contrast with the rigid symmetry of the European formal
garden was also perhaps part of the appeal of Japanese gardens, which
were deemed pictorial rather than architectural, although in neither form,
as an article in The Times in 1910 pointed out, was ‘nature allowed
to have her way’.30
The ‘impression of fantastic unreality’, Conder argued,
which Japanese garden designs produced on the minds of Westerners was
the result of the refusal of naturalism, also found in Japanese art. In
both landscape painting and garden design, nature was represented, not
reproduced. Leading characteristics were selected and accentuated so as
to combine ‘a mood of nature and also a mood of man’. A garden should
be designed ‘to suggest a suitable idea and arouse definite pleasurable
associations’, the ideal Japanese garden being, therefore, ‘a retreat
for secluded ease and meditation’.
Underlying order derived from the careful placement
of plants; scale and proportion were also crucial. This explains the siting
next to the stream and stepping stones in Hornel’s garden of a once carefully
pruned example of ‘cloud’ topiary, now an over-grown conifer destined
to be cut down. The stream itself, now run dry, reveals pipe work relating
to an original water feature in the nearby rocks. All of these elements,
at one time, were positioned so as to suggest some ideal environment.
Nature had to be coaxed to perfection by electric pumps and elementary
plumbing. Conder demonstrated, too, the importance of stone garden lanterns,
also required to harmonize with their surroundings and placed so that,
once lit, their reddish light would reflect on water. He insisted on the
metaphorical value of the particular shape and relationship of stones
in the Japanese garden, often intended to suggest natural scenery. He
also explained the influence of Buddhist priests from the twelfth century
in the selection and grouping of standing-stones with imaginary and religious
attributes. He described particular tea gardens with their extreme simplicity
and affectation of natural wildness; their stone lanterns, water basins,
rocks and gateways - characteristic features of Hornel’s own garden -
all combined to produce an appearance of antiquity
But the Scots artist’s ‘Eastern garden’ represented
his own ideal territory, and in substituting Japanese stones for those
of ancient local origin, like the Dalshangan cross and stones from the
nearby thirteenth century Dundrennan Abbey from where Mary Queen Scots
made her ‘fatal decision’ to leave Scotland, he created iconographic references
to his fantasy of place and of an historic, organic Scottish culture,
free of conflict and as much in harmony with nature and the landscape
as were the young girls he depicted in his paintings. An interesting absence
in his library - one that speaks volumes - are books on contemporary labour
issues and accounts of recent local and political concerns.
Hornel’s success in cultivating and promoting a very
particular regional and cultural identity - a place myth - and, as a result,
in attracting visitors (artistic and otherwise) is evident still today.
The local ‘artists’ town’ web-site and recent surveys suggests that ‘as
Gauguin was a magnet to Pont Aven, so Hornel was to Kirkcudbright’. Increasingly
after the turn of the century his deep attachment to place produced a
particular home-, or, rather, garden-sickness. On his trip to Ceylon in
1907 he was disappointed that the colours did not meet his anticipations
and the country was less exotic than he had imagined. Disenchanted, unable
to reconcile expectations and actual experience, he is nostalgic for his
own garden. The ‘going away’ simply intensified his idealisations, and
he wrote: ‘I go home with double interest in my garden, . from letters
. my garden has been doing marvels. The Peonies were magnificent, & my
Wisteria which I have longed for many weary years to see in bloom, took
advantage of my absence and made a royal show.’ 32
On his return, as Smith records, Hornel showed annually
at Royal Academy exhibitions, pictures which had become increasingly mechanical
and repetitious, often just reversing images from other paintings.33
But steady financial rewards were enough to allow
him to concentrate on house and garden. In 1916 the still new journal
Scottish Country Life (which first appeared in 1914) visited
Broughton House (fig.15), noting the old world picturesque atmosphere
of the town and its ancient history. The entrancing ‘old world garden’
behind Hornel’s house reminded the author of Herrick’s bewitching ‘wild
civility’, and he or she felt moved as ‘with the insistence of an old
melody‘.34 Such a
location was perfect material for that journal: it was ‘a treasury of
art, impeccable taste, and irresistible effects . the external efflorescence
of the soul of the painter whose joyous creations have profoundly enlarged
the aesthetic vision of the race’. All of this was clearly aimed at a
readership much concerned with matters of historic, Scottish tradition,
with the cultivation of taste, with issues of preservation and conservation
and drawn to nostalgic representations of historical harmony.
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Fig.15 E. A. Hornel’s garden Photograph in Scottish County Life 1916 |
These, essentially, were Hornel’s own concerns. His
collecting mania was accelerating as he acquired, in 1919, local publisher
Thomas Fraser’s own library of books on Borders’ history and folklore
to add to his own. At this point he apparently envisaged creating an art
gallery and library alongside his garden to hand down to the local people
of Kirkcudbright.35
But at the same time he continued his infatuation with Japan, still intent
on recreating the impact of that first visit, still seeking enchantment
and sensual gratification, and perhaps hoping to rekindle the vitality
quite lost from his paintings. So he travelled via Burma to Japan again
for six months in 1920 and painted gardens mostly in Kyoto, which he used
as backgrounds in pictures, having been given a ‘gorgeous book’, as a
memento and taken on a tour of the best local gardens by the son of Marquis
Matsukata.
Nostalgia and memory became central themes of Hornel’s
late work: indeed, Memories of Mandelay is the title of a large
work still hanging inside Broughton House. For a visitor named Dorothy
Burnie in 1925, the importance of memory, the transience of summer and
of life was expressed metaphorically outside the house, too, - in the
garden, in the form of three old sundials ‘silent reminders of Time’.
For Burnie, the house itself contained an unrivalled collection of the
history and literature, the ‘folk-lore and romance of the storied land
of Galloway’: it was ‘the veriest poem of art in nature‘.36
Such had been the ambition of the artist in his paintings,
but it was perhaps outside, in his garden, that he was best able to create
an ideal space, an ideal identity and cultural landscape.
Notes
1. Stephen Harvey, ‘An Eastern Garden’, Scottish Field, March 1977, p.24. For recent newspaper description see also David Stuart, ‘East Meets West in Galloway’, The Scotsman, 8 August 1999.
2. Originally from Kirkcudbright, Hornel’s family (his father was a bootmaker) emigrated to Australia in 1856, where Edward was born in 1864. The family returned to Kirkcudbright in 1866.
3. Hornel’s career is described in most detail by Bill Smith, The Life and Work of Edward Atkinson Hornel, Atelier Books, Edinburgh 1997. See also discussion of Hornel in Patrick Bourne, Kirkcudbright, 100 Kirkcudbright, 100 Years of an Artist’s Colony, Atelier Books, Edinburgh, 2000. On the activities of Reid as dealer, see Frances Fowle, Alexander Reid, unpublished thesis, 1993 and for more reference to George Henry, see Roger Billcliffe, The Glasgow Boys, 1985.
4. For discussion of Sargent’s painting see Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism in Britain, exhibition catalogue, Yale University Press and Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1995, pp.43-4.
5. Marion Hepworth Dixon, ‘Monticelli’, The Art Journal, 1895, p.212.
6. On Hornel’s exposure to Monticelli in Scotland, see Bill Smith 1997, pp.41-2.
7. For similar reading of space within the depiction of idyllic, enclosed landscapes, see Sam Smiles, ‘Samuel Palmer and the Pastoral Inheritance’, Landscape Research, Winter 1986, pp.11-15.
8. The Bards of Galloway: A Collection of Poems, Songs, Ballads etc by Natives of Galloway, ed. and intro. Malcolm McL. Harper, Thomas Fraser, Dalbeattie, 1889, p.vi.
9. The Druids received positive reviews when it was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1890.
10. John Morrison, ‘Nationalism and Nationhood: Late Nineteenth-Century Painting in Scotland’, in M.Faco and S.L.Hirsch eds., Art, Culture and National Identity in Fin de Siècle Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp.195-8.
11. See Lindsay Errington, ‘Celtic elements in Scottish art at the turn of the century’, in John Christian, ed, The Last Romantics, the Romantic Tradition in British Art from Burne Jones to Stanley Spencer, Barbican Art Gallery and Lund Humphries, London, 1989.
12. Mackie may have kept Hornel informed of developments in Pont Aven and, As Bill Smith (1997, p.56) records, Mackie met Gauguin in Paris in 1891.
13. ‘Concarneau as a Sketching Ground’, The Studio, vol.24, 1895, p.180.
14. Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth, Macmillan Press, London, 1992, p.228.
15. MacColl’s Spectator review of the Henry and Hornel’s at the Liverpool exhibition in 1892.
16. Ary Renan, ‘Hokusai’s Man-gwa’, in S. Bing, ed, Artistic Japan, vol.II, 1889, p.104.
17. Hornel’s 1895 lecture, ‘Japan’, Corporation Art Galleries, Glasgow, 9 February 1895 (transcript from Broughton House).
18. Ibid
19. Japan, A Record in Colour, Mortimer Menpes, Adam and Charles Black, first edition 1901 (this edition 1905), pp.77-9.
20. Menpes, ibid., p.111.
21. Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel and Nineteenth-century Japan, Routledge, London, 2003.
22. ‘Glasgow .’ indecipherable hand written record in Broughton House, dated April 1895.
23. James Caw, Scottish Art, Past and Present 1620-1908, (first published 1908), Kingsmead Reprints, Bath, 1990, p.401.
24. Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, Henry and Co., London, 1896, p.699.
25. For extremely interesting recent essays see Frances Fowle, Belinda Thomson, Murdo Macdonald, et.al, Patrick Geddes: The French Connection, White Cockade Publishing in assoc. with the Scottish Society for Art History, Oxford, 2004.
26. Patrick Geddes, ‘The Sociology of Autumn’, in The Evergreen, The Book of Autumn, 1895 part II, pp.31-8.
27. E. Rimbault Dibdin, The Studio, XLI, June 1907, pp.3-9.
28. Josiah Condor, Landscape Gardening in Japan, first published 1892 (but a 1912 supplement), this edition, Kodansha International, 2002, intro by Azby Brown, pp.8-9.
29. Ibid., p.8.
30. The Times, 28 May 1910, p.10.
31. ‘Dundrennan Abbey - A Personal Tour’, see freespace.virgin.net/richard.wordsmith/duntour.htm.
32. Letter in archive at Broughton House, also cited in Bill Smith 1997, pp.115-6.
33. Ibid.
34. Jas. Shaw Simpson, Scottish Country Life, June 1916, ‘Broughton House, Kirkcudbright: The Residence of Mr E.A.Hornel’, pp.260-3.
35. This became the Hornel Trust, later passing to the Scottish National Trust.
36. From a transcript at Broughton House of Dorothy Burnie’s account of A Galloway Garden, 4 September 1925.
Acknowledgements
This is a version of a paper delivered at a symposium
on the theme of the Art of the Garden exhibition, held on 18
June 2004 at Tate Britain. I should like to offer my thanks to Joanna
Banham, Head of Public Programmes at Tate Britain and to the curators
of the exhibition Stephen Daniels, Nicholas Alfrey and Martin Postle.
I should also like to thank Jim Allan, librarian of the Hornel Trust at
Broughton House for his help in this research, and Bill Smith.
Ysanne Holt is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of
Northumbria and editor of the Manchester University Press journal Visual Culture in Britain.
Tate Papers Autumn 2004
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