Edward Arthur Walton, 1860 - 1922. Artist (With his fiancee Helen Law or Henderson, 1859 - 1945, later Mrs Edward Arthur Walton, as Hokusai and the Butterfly)

Edward Arthur Walton was one of Lavery's closest Glasgow Boy colleagues, and this 1889 double portrait carries the playful informality that characterised the group's social world. The painting shows Walton and his fiancée Helen Henderson in costume as Hokusai and the Butterfly — a reference to the intense Japonisme that swept British avant-garde circles in the late 1880s. James McNeill Whistler had made Japanese aesthetic principles central to progressive British painting, and the Glasgow Boys absorbed these ideas enthusiastically. Lavery's choice to cast his friends in Japanese roles was both a celebration of shared aesthetic values and an exercise in decorative portraiture freed from the stuffiness of official commissions. The costume conceit allowed him to combine rich pattern, exotic colour, and psychological intimacy in a single canvas.

Lavery used the Japanese costume to introduce flat areas of rich pattern — silk kimono, decorative fan — into a composition that balances decorative surface against three-dimensional portraiture. The brushwork is relatively controlled compared to Lavery's looser outdoor work, achieving a smooth finish appropriate to the silken textures depicted.