From 1893-94, Edward Hornel spent eighteen months on his first visit to Japan. His artwork featured young girls in non-naturalistic, flattened perspectives with high toned colours (Smith 37). He was a notable colorist with exquisite detail of the joyful nature around him and brought out the beauty in colours alone instead of the subjects associated with it (Kurtz 56). He was one of many members of the Scotland based Glasgow School of artists to have been influenced by the Japanese aesthetic.

Concerning Hornel’s Geisha, the oil painting was originally titled The Balcony, Yokohama and was colored before it went through half tone engraving. The title change suggests that the editors wanted to give the image a short and identifiable name. Whereas Hornel's original title emphasizes the aspect of everyday life, the new title Geisha can be interpreted as highlighting an exotic femininity.

Geisha features a Japanese woman looking ahead at the sailing ships underneath a clouded sky. Hornel omits the woman's facial expression, so the viewer cannot see her emotions towards the ships. It is a still image of a typical Japanese outing and could be either a portrayal of a woman curiously glancing at the sea or glumly saying farewell to the ships.

In this context, the Japanese fan is a personal symbol of femininity with an exotic curiosity that was never featured in The Yellow Book. It is difficult to say if the woman is an actual geisha or her attire is akin to a geisha's gown. The inclusion of this painting in the eight volume of The Yellow Book suggests that people were taking interest in Japanese items as a result of Japonism styled artworks. In this case, it is promoting the clothing this woman is wearing, as well as accessories such as the fan.

Prior to the nineteenth century, Japanese art was largely ignored and did not influence parts of French art and culture until the opening of Japanese foreign trade. While many Western artists were influenced by the aesthetics of Japonism, they only saw it as a self-fulfilling supplement to their own Eurocentric perspective of their work. Chae Ryung Kim suggests that that mentality eventually deteriorated and Japanese art was considered a “cultural engine” that drove the Western arts world to achieve originality (11) and provide a fresh start from the illusionary representations of the past (12). This would progress to the creation of a new visual reality and these aspects, as Kim later mentions, would go on to influence early twentieth century Impressionists, Realists, Post Impressionists, and Symbolists (12).

Aside from Hornel, The Yellow Book featured many Aubrey Beardsley paintings in the style of the Japanese Grotesque. Linda Zatlin suggests that his obsession with the Grotesque was because of the exaggerated way it expresses fear and helplessness and how it critiques those emotions (89-91). In the Japanese tradition, this is seen as commonplace, as it was okay to satirize human fears. Furthermore, the erotic art prevalent in some of Beardsley’s work is influenced by the Japanese perception of sex (Zatlin 93). In Japanese society, it was much more accepting in contrast to the strict Victorian values held in the West. Beardsley used his erotic images in The Yellow Book to progress past old notions of sexual relations and it is this action that contributed to his controversial reputation as an artist.