George Leslie Hunter

Alex Reid & Son, Glasgow; 
Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London;
Sotheby's, Edinburgh, 26 April 2007, lot 107;
Private collection

The board appears to be in sound and stable condition. There is a small area of minor craquelure to the dark pigment in the centre of the composition, only visible on close inspection. Otherwise the work appears to be in excellent overall condition and is clean and ready to hang. UV light inspection reveals no evidence of any retouching or restoration. Held in a gilt reeded frame and narrow cloth mount.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

With its brightness of colour and bold composition, Anemones is a powerful work in which the very essence of Hunter’s notion of painting are expressed in the intelligence of the colour harmony and arrangement of objects. The handling of paint and colour suggests that it was painted towards the end of the 1920s during Hunter’s stay in the South of France. In 1926, he moved to the South of France in search of new inspiration and the brilliant light of the French Riviera. In a letter to his friend Mathew Justice he writes, ‘I have been in St Paul a week and have just got into a new little studio attached to this hotel (Le Colombe D’Or) where I can paint still life as well as landscape. Still life is different from in Glasgow. Fruit is just coming on and flowers are abundant. This is a painters country.’ (T.J. Honeyman, Archives, National Library of Scotland)

During this period in his career Hunter was encouraged by his friend and biographer Tom Honeyman to concentrate on painting still-life and this was to give him a new and more focused direction in his work. With a ready market for Hunter’s still-lifes of flowers, he painted over a dozen large and ambitious canvases during this period, with much enthusiasm. Hunter loved nothing more than to paint flowers and he relished the prospect of devoting his time to still-life painting. There was a renewed vibrancy and freshness to his pictures, a clarity of colour and a striking contrast in his work, which is exceptional. In the early 1920s Hunter’s paint application had become rather tentative and lacking commitment, but later in the decade his paint was applied with spirit and force. Darkness gave way to light, as Hunter abandoned the dusky, brooding backdrops of his former works for lighter backgrounds, an artistic development exemplified by Anemones. Sunny yellows, warm pinks and vivid blues create a sensation of colour, reflecting the influence of Henri Matisse, one of Hunter’s most cherished artists. At the opening of an exhibition of Hunter’s work in New York in 1929, one critic declared: ‘…it would be difficult not to think of Matisse at first viewing of this exhibition. Yet, after looking at it longer one sees that there has been an influence of Matisse, but that here is a new individual palette and personality.’ (T.J. Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, 1937, p.135) The shape and curvature of Hunter’s blooming anemones echo Matisse’s Anemones and Chinese Vase of 1922. As Honeyman noted, ‘Technique, as mere technique, did not interest him; it was the vision behind that mattered. With all his vigour and impetuosity, his impulsive artistic urge was instinctively right in choice of colours and tones. It is this unerring sense of colour that made Hunter the artist he became.’ (ibid Honeyman, p.211)