GEORGE LESLIE HUNTER (SCOTTISH 1877-1931)
HOUSES ON A HILLSIDE, SOUTH OF FRANCE
Estimate: £3,000 - £5,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 112- 206 | Thursday 05 June from 6pm
Description
Signed, pen and ink and coloured chalk
Dimensions
38cm x 30.5cm (15in x 12in)
Provenance
Alex. Reid & Lefèvre Ltd., London (as ‘Landscape’)
Footnote
Between 1927 and 1929 Hunter spent extensive periods in the south of France, already familiar painting ground for his fellow Scottish Colourists F C B Cadell, J D Fergusson and S J Peploe. He wrote to his dealer, Alexander Reid, from Saint-Paul in 1927: ‘I like this country very much…I only came up here a week ago and am settled in a nice little studio attached to the hotel, where I can paint still life as well as landscape…Fruit is just coming on and flowers are abundant. This is a painter’s country.’ (Quoted in T. J. Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1937, p. 119).
Favoured working locations also included Antibes, Saint Tropez and Cassis and works such as Harbour, South of France, Street in Antibes and Houses on a Hillside, South of France, show how much Hunter enjoyed the climate, architecture and natural beauty of the region. All executed in pen, ink and coloured chalks, they reveal Hunter’s deftness of touch, whether depicting a boat, building, tree or hillside. Compositional devices such as a brightly-coloured boat in the foreground, or a verdant tree stretching up the left-hand side are combined with red roofs, green shutters and yellow-painted houses to create idyllic, sunkissed scenes.
All three works bear Alex. Reid & Lefèvre Ltd labels. The company was a merger of Alexander Reid’s Glasgow-based business, run by his son A. J. McNeill Reid following his father’s retirement in 1925 and that of the London-based Ernest Lefèvre in 1926. It continued to champion Hunter’s work for the rest of his life and in 1932 mounted a Memorial Exhibition in its Glasgow gallery in his honour.