George Leslie Hunter’s still life paintings of the 1920’s are especially vibrant, and demonstrate his ability to create dynamic compositions with a bold and highly skilled use of colour. Having spent t.mes in Paris before the First World War, Hunter was influenced by the work of Post-Impressionist and Fauvist artists and became an admirer of the avant-garde. The city had also attracted other Scottish artists and it is likely that Hunter first.mes t his fellow colourists, Samuel John Peploe and John Fergusson in Paris in 1911.

The 1920s were a defining period for Hunter, as he moved away from conventional still life paintings of objects set against a dark curtain, in a style influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Willem Kalf, whose works Hunter had seen in Glasgow museums. The present lot, with its exquisitely painted ginger jar, reflects the aesthetics of Japonism, which became a favourite theme among avant-garde artists then working in Paris. The short thick impasto and spontaneous brushstrokes of sunny yellows, warm greens and vivid blues evoke the voluptuous apples, flowers and surrounding composition with a freshness and vibrancy which reveal the influence of Henri Matisse, arguably Hunter’s favourite artist. But as his friend, the curator and collects or Tom Honeyman, realised, Hunter offered his own distinctive vision, with ‘a new individual palette and personality’, (T.J.Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, 1937, p. 135).

His ebullient use of brilliant colours is a total contrast to the tonal harmonies of Whistler, who Hunter greatly admired. Although Hunter modelled forms with less precision, the flattened perspective in the work is reminiscent of works by Cézanne and demonstrates the confident fluency with which Hunter applied line and colour. As he once declared: