£34,000
Scottish Paintings and Sculpture | 492
Auction: 14 June 2017 at 19:00 BST
Signed, oil on panel
Note: The view seen here is taken from the pier at the fishing village of Lower Largo in the East Neuk of Fife, which was a particularly favourite location for Hunter and he painted the same scene and indeed the same fishing boats, a number of times in the 1920s.
Perhaps the best known of these paintings is Summer Day Largo now in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, and a similar work was sold by Lyon & Turnbull in 2016. This painting however features more detail in the boats and a less azure sea, altogether more typical of the region.
Hunter first visited the little Fife fishing village of Lower Largo in 1919 and was drawn back there over the years, mainly during the summer months, until 1924, staying both on the coast and further inland at Ceres. While the buildings and marine life of the harbour provided abundant subject matter inspiration, the clear northern light from the sea clearly had a liberating effect upon his palette. We also know that in 1923 Hunter painted a series of pictures and made extensive sketches at Drumeldrie, a small hamlet near Largo, which at that time seemed to fire his imagination with its mixture of architecture and farmland.
The painting on offer clearly expresses Hunter's debt to the Post-Impressionists and in particular to Van Gogh, although his awareness of Cezanne's innovative artistic theories is also evident. While his later paintings of Largo depict the sea with flat, near geometric brushtrokes and with an almost Fauvist feel, the earlier ones, such as that offered here, embrace a looser and less stylised form of Post Impressionism.