Hornel’s photographic eye and the influence of Japanese photography: part 3

After his return to Scotland in 1894, Hornel honed an approach to painting that always seemed to begin with a photographic image. After his first exhibition of Japanese paintings was sensationally successful, he developed a method of manufacturing works that would sell. All his subsequent paintings focused on the twists and turns of the female form. The hands, feet and bodies reflect the studied poses seen in the Japanese prints he collected. The figures are enshrined in scenes of dreamy colour and light, an imaginary rural setting that did not reflect modern reality (fig. 1).

Hornel purchased Broughton House in Kirkcudbright in 1901 and added a large studio to the back. This is where he started using photography to capture the choreographed poses he would transfer into paint. His eldest sister Tizzy became his housekeeper. Local girls, chaperoned by their mothers and guided in the studio by Tizzy, began posing for Hornel. His friend Robert McConchie helped with the photography while Hornel directed the girls to move and stand in particular ways; ways that reflected the specific poses of the Japanese dancers (figs. 2, 3 and 4).

At this point, Hornel became a compositor, taking a hand from one photograph and a tilt of the head from another, then applying a broad hard outline and detailed attention to skin tone on the faces of the figures in his paintings (figs. 5, 6 and 7).

It was not the identity of an individual Hornel sought to interpret, but the ideal surface of the female form – a purely objective exercise to find the ‘ideal’ pose. The girls are then surrounded by an increasingly frenzied thick impasto, suggesting a setting, perhaps a tree, a bay or a flowering shrub. In the first two decades of the 1900s, Hornel created over 1,600 glass plates. The largest selection is of local girls, but there are also a number of photographs from Hornel and Tizzy’s 1907 trip to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and 1920 visit to Myanmar (then Burma) (figs. 8 and 9). They all echo the tropes he had discovered in the Japanese commercial photographs.

Concluding paradox

Photography is inherently paradoxical, as it’s a modern technology used to capture the essence of the past. In Japan, many photographs were taken to record the country’s period of change but the vast majority of photographic prints focused on ancient feudal customs, ‘exotic’ habits and traditional costumes, as these were popular with nostalgic, curious, western tourists. Japanese photographers encouraged this market, satisfying their audience’s fetish for feudal and female idealism.

Hornel hoped to find a pre-industrial idyll in Japan, ‘a paradise of babies and pretty girls, a land of cherry blossom and seductive tea house life’. However, he was disappointed with the modernising country he encountered in 1893. Ironically, it was the modern technology of photography that gave him the ideal world he longed to witness, and to paint.

The Morton Charitable Trust has been funding fieldwork on the National Trust for Scotland’s photographic collections since 2014. In 2018–19, this work will further raise the profile of the collections through research, articles, talks and dedicated projects. The project will also involve the digitisation of the Margaret Fay Shaw photographic archive of mid-20th-century Hebridean life, leading to an updated database with high-quality images.