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Framed: 72 x 81 cm
signed lower right
Exhibited:
The Fine Art Society Ltd, London, 1971; The Scottish Gallery & Ewan Mundy Fine Art Ltd, Duke Street, London, 2018; Modern Masters 180, January 2022 – The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
Hunter made several sketching trips and extended visits to Fife c.1919, and 1922–23. He had spent more time on the east coast to recover from a breakdown suffered after his first London show in 1923 (with Peploe and Cadell), and his work was selling well. Having secured a joint contract with Aitken Dott in Edinburgh and Alex Reid in Glasgow from April 1924, he was in fine fettle and enjoyed the constant support of friends like Matthew Justice of Dundee. A key group exhibition of the artists now known as the four Scottish Colourists had been held in Paris in June ’24, whereupon a French critic noted ‘Hunter does not paint for the present but for the future’. Thereafter, the artist spent three years in Scotland consolidating what he had learned and painting well. Hunter’s series of standard-sized oil panels of Largo harbour in summer are some of his most distinctive and successful works, proving enduringly popular on the market. As with Cadell at the North End of Iona, Hunter focused on a specific location and relished these arrangements of quayside/headland/fishing and rowing boats, all subject to the fleeting vagaries of the elements (although Cadell preferred ‘Scottish weather’ to summer skies and calm sea). Tides can be shown high or low, and on occasion the quay can be seen crowded with figures. The present picture is on a larger format perhaps to better reflect the stormy seas and muted palette, while the boats strain at their moorings. A vigorous and imposing painting by an artist working at the peak of his powers, it reveals varied brushwork and liberal use of impasto.
Born in Rothesay in 1877, George Leslie Hunter emigrated to California in 1892 where his father bought a farm. He spent all his time drawing and when his family came back to Scotland in 1900 he remained in California and became part of the Bohemian lifestyle of San Francisco. He earned money by acquiring illustration work for newspapers and magazines. He went to New York with friends and then on to Paris in 1904, working in each city for a few months. Back in San Francisco he lost everything in the 1906 earthquake and shortly thereafter returned to Scotland. He had his first solo exhibition with Alexander Reid in Glasgow in 1915, an association which continued until his death in 1931. From 1923 he exhibited with Peploe and Cadell as the Three Scottish Colourists, and spent much of the twenties in France, often subsidised by Reid and a coterie of dedicated collectors, including T.J. Honeyman who wrote his biography after his untimely death at the age of fifty-four.
Leslie Hunter, as I review the good old days, seems to be all-pervasive. I knew him first in San Francisco, and we lived the carefree Bohemian life and were unaware of it. I moved to New York; and he came down Broadway as accustomed as a piece of scenery. Paris – and there was Hunter sketching on a street corner. London – and Hunter hailed me from the next table of a Chelsea restaurant. Glasgow – and Hunter, finding my name at a hotel in an obscure newspaper paragraph, called me up on the telephone. I have no doubt that if I ever visit Damascus I shall find him there ahead of me. And always the same Hunter; Scotch from his accent to his walk, quietly friendly, quaintly witty. I had laughed with him many times over these recurrent meetings of ours before I realised how much the boy I knew and starved with in San Francisco was coming to mean in modern art. When in the first decade of this century painting shook off the Victorian shackles, he found himself. Reid, the famous Glasgow dealer, a leader in the Modernist movement, ‘brought him out’. Reid it was who introduced Degas, Manet and Renoir to Great Britain. Tradition says that he was one of the few men whom the crusty Degas would admit to his Studio. He sold most of Whistler’s paintings. And Reid’s verdict that Hunter is ‘a more powerful Colourist than Matisse and equally refined’ carries authenticity. Hunter belongs to that school which Paris calls les écossais modernes. This group of late has given exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries in London and the select Barbazanges Gallery in Paris: in both instances the force and purity of their colour attracted sensational attention. Fergusson and Peploe of this modern group have already exhibited in New York; but although Hunter grew up in California this is his first appearance in an American gallery. He lives and paints, now, on the Côte d’Azur; and that richly coloured country is the inspiration for most of these landscapes. Will Irwin, 1929 (reviewing Hunter’s exhibition at the Ferargil Gallery, New York)
G. L. Hunter & The Scottish Gallery
In April 1924, Alexander Reid and The Scottish Gallery signed a joint contract with G.L. Hunter and his first solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery was held in the autumn. This was a momentous year for The Colourists which saw the exhibition Les Peintres de l’Écosse Moderne at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, featuring Peploe, Fergusson, Hunter and Cadell. It was also a productive time for Hunter, who worked in Fife, on Loch Lomond and in a Glasgow studio for most of the next three years. From 1928, Hunter was living mostly in the South of France, based in Saint[1]Paul-de-Vence, but he continued to send work back to The Gallery.
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