The bell-ringer shown here was Francis Harris, the town crier of Kirkcudbright where Hornel spent most of his early years following his parents’ return to the town after a period in Australia. Harris was known in the town as ‘the old cracked bell’. By 1887, when this work was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, the vogue for realistic paintings of contemporary subjects was at its height. Hornel was then in his early twenties and had recently returned to Scotland after training at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp where he narrowly missed being a fellow-student of Vincent Van Gogh; the vigorous handling of paint here is clearly influenced by his recent exposure to modern trends in European painting.

Edward Atkinson Hornel, 1864-1933

Hornel was born in Australia, but as an infant returned with his family to Kirkcudbright, from where they earlier emigrated. He studied art in Edinburgh, and in Antwerp under Charles Verlat. During the late 1880s and early 1890s he rented a studio in Glasgow and formed a friendship with a fellow Glasgow Boy, George Henry. Together they developed a new decorative style that superseded the early realism of the Glasgow Boys. Hornel's work of this period concentrated on colour and pattern and became very popular, but this very popularity led him, after about 1919, to adopt a formulaic and sterile approach to painting.