.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Still Life with Fruit is a bold, vibrant portrayal of fruit and flowers laid across a table, staging Hunter’s mastery of colour. One of the four Scottish Colourists, Hunter’s cosmopolitan life, which spanned San Francisco, Paris, London and Glasgow, exposed him to the avant-garde across multiple continents, which he used as a point of departure to create his own distinctive style.
While the present work is undated, it likely dates from the 1920s, when Hunter particularly focused on still lifes. He lived between Fife and Glasgow, while visiting Paris, the French Riviera, Florence and Venice with his fellow Colourist J.D. Fergusson. Hunter had first seen Picasso and Matisse’s work at Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ home in Paris in 1908, but now after the First World War, he became reacquainted with Cézanne and the Fauves, inspiring his striking still lifes.
In Still Life with Fruit, an outcrop of orange paint anchors the centre of the composition, hard and textured. It complements the otherwise blue tonality of the picture: the rough, deep blue of the tablecloth and the lighter, aqueous blue of the seat behind. The orange nestles against grapes on a plate and to the left is a pink flower emerging from a dense arrangement of foliage. On the upper left-hand side is a glass of water, a passage of delicate painting that hovers on the verge of translucency and reflects Hunter’s engagement with artists of the Dutch Golden Age.
The broad palette serves to animate the whole surface of the painting, Hunter threading through strains of blue, yellow and pink, especially in the wall in the background, so that the whole work seems to tremble with colour and refuse to stabilise in the viewer’s eye. The movement from the dark blue in the foreground to the lighter colouring in the background creates depth in the work, while allowing Hunter to disregard conventional single-point perspective and experiment with his brushwork, creating an enigmatic and intense spatial environment, overwhelmed by the objects on the table. The painting stays alive with Hunter’s impasto, which draws in both the eye and the viewer’s sense of touch. As Hunter would later say, ‘Everyone must choose his own way, and mine will be the way of colour’ (quoted in T. J. Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, London, 1937, p. 97).
While the present work is undated, it likely dates from the 1920s, when Hunter particularly focused on still lifes. He lived between Fife and Glasgow, while visiting Paris, the French Riviera, Florence and Venice with his fellow Colourist J.D. Fergusson. Hunter had first seen Picasso and Matisse’s work at Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ home in Paris in 1908, but now after the First World War, he became reacquainted with Cézanne and the Fauves, inspiring his striking still lifes.
In Still Life with Fruit, an outcrop of orange paint anchors the centre of the composition, hard and textured. It complements the otherwise blue tonality of the picture: the rough, deep blue of the tablecloth and the lighter, aqueous blue of the seat behind. The orange nestles against grapes on a plate and to the left is a pink flower emerging from a dense arrangement of foliage. On the upper left-hand side is a glass of water, a passage of delicate painting that hovers on the verge of translucency and reflects Hunter’s engagement with artists of the Dutch Golden Age.
The broad palette serves to animate the whole surface of the painting, Hunter threading through strains of blue, yellow and pink, especially in the wall in the background, so that the whole work seems to tremble with colour and refuse to stabilise in the viewer’s eye. The movement from the dark blue in the foreground to the lighter colouring in the background creates depth in the work, while allowing Hunter to disregard conventional single-point perspective and experiment with his brushwork, creating an enigmatic and intense spatial environment, overwhelmed by the objects on the table. The painting stays alive with Hunter’s impasto, which draws in both the eye and the viewer’s sense of touch. As Hunter would later say, ‘Everyone must choose his own way, and mine will be the way of colour’ (quoted in T. J. Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, London, 1937, p. 97).