George Leslie Hunter

(British, 1877-1931)

Still life with Chinese vase, fruit and silver salver 61.5 x 50.8 cm. (24 3/16 x 20 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Ex collection of J Gibson Jarvie
Sale; Christie's, Glasgow, 8 December 1988, Lot 308

'It is this unerring sense of colour that made Hunter the artist he became... never a jarring pattern is found, or an inharmonious tone in his colour schemes - rich and glowing as they are without a hint of garishness.' (T. J. Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, 1937, p. 211)

Hunter usually composed his still lifes around a central motif of fruit, flowers, and ceramics. He would return to his Glasgow studio with ripe fruit or a selection of blooms and used interestingly shaped ceramics to contain them and construct a pleasing and sophisticated still life from which to work. For the present picture he chose a Chinese jar to draw the eye into the composition, and a pink rose delicately lying to the side. The silver tray and melon suggest an influence from seventeenth century Dutch still life painting, which Hunter is known to have admired and been influenced by at an earlier period in his career.

The sale of this picture to Hunter's cousin, the wealthy banker and barrister John Gibson-Jarvie (1883-1964), would have brought Hunter much needed money at a time when his finances were particularly stretched and he was making concerted efforts to paint impressive pictures for sale. The impetus of the later 1920s gave his pictures a dramatic energy and confidence which he had never reached in his work before.