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signed u.l.: L Hunter

oil on board

PROVENANCE

Birmingham, The Ruskin Gallery;
Private collection
CATALOGUE NOTE

With its brightness of colour and bold composition, Still Life with Dahlias and Fruit is a powerfully beautiful 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 Still Life with Dahlias and Fruit was painted towards the end of the 1920's during Hunter's stay in the South of France. In 1926, he moved to the South of France in search of a new painting ground. 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 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 life's 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 1920's Hunter's paint application had become rather tentative and lacking commitment, but later in the decade his paint was applied with spirit and force. 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.' (T. J. Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, pg. 211).