When Alexander Reid mounted his late-autumn exhibition of George Leslie Hunter’s recent work at La Société des Beaux-Arts in West George Street in December 1923, the critic of the Glasgow Herald found the show one not to be missed. He wrote how Hunter was, ‘fully in touch with modern movements’, painting ‘with an opulent palette’ and reaching after ‘a fuller and more prismatic range of colour harmonies’ (Glasgow Herald, 19 December 1923, p. 12). The present work, which has La Société des Beaux-Arts on the reverse, answers to this praise. It is a prime example of Hunter’s achievements in the still life genre which, alongside his Scottish Colourist contemporaries, transformed the possibilities of painting in Scotland.

In the centre of the work stands a bouquet of white chrysanthemums, their petals full and layered, the heart cream-white and the margins flushed with pink and faint violet, the green leaves of the foliage looping down around the stems. The flowers sit in a small vessel of blood-red terracotta banded with cream. The vessel rests on a heavily patterned tablecloth, a tapestry of deep oranges, coral reds, creams, and dark greens. To the right of the bouquet rests a porcelain plate bearing three apples in lemon-yellow and orange-red, standing out against the textured linen cloth behind. In front of the fruit, laid diagonally across the cloth, is an ivory-handled knife: a recurring still-life device in Hunter work which he took directly from his close study of Chardin and the Dutch seventeenth-century masters. Next to it lies a single peach or apple, the vertical white strokes suggesting its flesh. The background meanwhile is also made up of patterned pinks, ochres, blues, slate-greens and coral patterns. This combination of colour and form with thick, energetic brushwork creates a bold and dynamic work that is even more impactful on account of its large scale.

Alexander Reid, who showed the painting in his Glasgow gallery, was the primary champion of the Scottish Colourists, and had given Hunter exhibitions in 1913 and 1916. In those early shows, Hunter’s still-lifes used restrained colour against black backgrounds as he looked primarily to the traditional Dutch still-life genre. The 1920s were a critical decade that heralded a new direction in which colour was given primary expression. T. J. Honeyman, critic, curator and another important champion of the Colourists, identified how ‘Hunter's impulsive artistic urge was instinctively right in choice of colours and tones. It is this unerring sense of colour that made Hunter the artist he became’ (T. J. Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, 1937, p.21). 

Comparable examples include Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, circa 1923–26, in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In these paintings we see the how the work of Cezanne, Matisse and the Fauves, whom Hunter had seen first-hand during his time in France, transformed his approach to painting. Still Life with Chrysanthemums, Fruit and Patterned Cloth embodies the spirit which would define his work of the 1920s, arguably his most creative and successful period, before his untimely death in 1931 aged 54.