Edward Atkinson Hornel was a Scottish painter of landscapes, flowers, and foliage, with children.
He was born in Australia but moved to Kirkcudbright, Scotland where he spent most of his life. He studied for three years at the art school at Edinburgh, and for two years at Antwerp under Professor Verlat. Returning from Antwerp in 1885, he met George Henry and associated himself with the Glasgow School.
Hornel and Henry collaborated upon The Druids Bringing In The Mistletoe (1890), a procession of priests bringing in the sacred mistletoe. The two worked side by side to achieve decorative splendor of color, Hornel boldly and freely employing texture effects produced by loading and scraping, roughening, smoothing, and staining. In 1893-94 the two artists spent a year and a half in Japan, where Hornel learned much about decorative design and spacing. This visit proved to be of paramount importance in the development of his style. He began to use the flat tow dimensional forms common in Japanese woodblock prints and combined this with rich colours and textured paint.
Upon his return to Scotland he designed and built a Japanese garden in Kircudbright, which is open to the public to this day. Broughton House and its gardens is a curious mix of Japanese and Scottish styles, set out in the early 1900s by Hornel.
Towards the close of the nineties his colors, while preserving their glow and richness, became more refined and more atmospheric, and his drawing more naturalistic, combining sensuous appeal with emotional and poetic significance. In 1901 he declined election to the Royal Scottish Academy.
