The present work belongs to a series of swift en plein air sketches George Leslie Hunter made of figures at leisure on the wide sands of Étaples, Normandy circa 1913-14. Hunter had in fact found himself caught up in the tensions of the moment at the outbreak of World War I. With sketchbook in hand working on the northern coast, he attracted the attention of the gendarmerie on alert for German agents. T. J. Honeyman, Hunter’s dealer, would later record that Hunter’s ‘fresh complexion and blonde hair probably assisted the spy maniacs in their search’. After being arrested and then escaping for Paris, he made home for Scotland taking what work he could with him. The present picture quite possibly is one of those that survived the return journey.

Born at Rothesay on the Isle of Bute in 1877, Hunter was largely self-taught. His family emigrated to California in 1892, and he spent fourteen formative years between San Francisco’s bohemian periphery and providing illustrations for Overland Monthly, taking only the most elementary painting lessons from a family acquaintance. He lost his early oil paintings in a fire that followed an earthquake in 1906 and returned to Scotland later that year, settling in Glasgow as an illustrator with painterly ambitions. He went to Paris in 1908 where, under the guidance of Alice Toklas (partner of Gertude Stein) whom he had known in San Francisco, he visited 27 Rue de Fleurus and saw first-hand the Steins’ Cézannes and Matisses, which proved a revelatory encounter. In 1910 he returned to the city with the painter Edward Archibald Taylor and his wife Jessie Marion King, who introduced him to his compatriot with similar avant-garde ambitions, Samuel John Peploe.

Working in Étaples, Hunter was following a tradition of British, American and Australian painters who since the early 1880s had visited its artistic colony, drawn by its cheap living and picturesque fishing harbour. Henry Herbert La Thangue, Frank Bramley, Edward Stott and Norman Garstin had all worked there previously. Hunter, characteristically, did not join the colony so much as work alongside it. A reproduced letter from 1914 in Honeyman’s biography of 1937 notes that Hunter had ‘been where Cézanne had worked etc.’, producing ‘a number of chalk drawings in colour…quite a departure from the things he had originally shown’. The departure, plainly visible in the present oil, is the dissolution of academic, Dutch-style chiaroscuro into flat patches of bright local colour, expressed in free and bold brushwork.

The handling throughout is what Honeyman would later call working ‘with the lid off’. A loaded brush, charged once, does the entire mass of the red figure in a single pass; the central white passage is dragged in long vertical strokes that retain the bristle marks of the brush; the chair legs are reduced to a quick handful of strokes. The colours are set off against the warm grey of the board that Hunter leaves daringly empty. With these works, Hunter developed the style that would see him become - as they are now collectively referred to - one of the famous Scottish Colourists.

The Étaples paintings thus mark a critical moment in Hunter’s career. On the back of them, Alexander Reid, the dealer who had brought van Gogh, Whistler and the work of the French Impressionists before the Scottish collecting public, held one-man exhibitions for him in 1913 and 1916. They revealed an avant-garde artist enthral equally to colour and form, and who would contribute his own significant chapter to the development of modern art in Scotland.