? GEORGE LESLIE HUNTER (SCOTTISH 1877-1931) LES ENVIRONS DE FLORENCE Signed, oil on board (46cm x 41cm (18in x 16in)) Provenance: Alexander Reid Esq, Glasgow Thomas M. McInnes Esq, Glasgow by 1923 Exhibited: The Leicester Galleries, London, Paintings by S. J. Peploe, F. C. B. Cadell & Leslie Hunter, January 1923, no. 74 (as 'Landscape (Environs of Florence)') Glasgow Art Gallery, Leslie Hunter, 1942 National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, Leslie Hunter 1877-1931, June 1942, no.91 Literature: Derek Ogston, Leslie Hunter: Paintings and Drawings of France and Italy, Baillieknowe Publishing, Kelso, 2004, listed p.85. Hunter visited Florence in 1922 and 1923. In a letter to his patron, the Dundee dentist John Tattersall, Hunter wrote excitedly: ‘Florence…is a wonderful city – the city itself with all its places of interest would take weeks to see and one could spend months in the galleries, where there are some truly marvellous things, especially by the great Italians, Florentines and Venetians….Then there are the great frescoes in the churches. I can assure you their greatness simply stuns one.’ (quoted in T. J. Honeyman, Introducing Leslie Hunter, Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 1937, p.88). A clue to the possible setting of Les Environs de Florence may be given later in the same letter, when Hunter continues: ‘Settignano is about 3 ½ miles from Florence, so I have been glad to have intervals of nature gazing after regarding these marvels of the mind. It reminds me very much of California here and I feel at home somehow among the olive trees and the orchards…It is all so far removed from what is modern, northern and commercial.’ (op.cit., pp.88-89) Les Environs de Florence was one of five works from the Tuscan trip that were included in the landmark exhibition Paintings by S. J. Peploe, F. C. B. Cadell and Leslie Hunter (working title ‘Three Scottish Artists’) mounted at the Leicester Galleries, London in 1923. This was the first time the work of the three artists was presented together and sowed the seed of the concept of them as a group, soon to be with the addition of J. D. Ferguson, which was to be cultivated over the following years by the Glasgow-based dealer Alexander Reid and his son, A. J. McNeill Reid. Hunter’s biographical note in the catalogue was brief: ‘George Leslie Hunter was born in Scotland. He studied in San Francisco and Paris. He has painted in California and in Scotland and has recently been working in Italy. Mr Hunter is still in the early forties.’ (p.8). He was represented by nineteen works, thirteen of which were unspecified still lifes. Environs de Florence was lent to the Leicester Galleries by Thomas McInnes of Glasgow. He was a younger brother of Hunter’s great friend, the collector William McInnes, whose bequest to Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in 1944 included twenty-three works by the artist. We are grateful to James McNaught, author of ‘The McInnes Collection: William McInnes (1868-1944) and his Role as Patron of the Arts in Glasgow during the First Half of the 20th Century’ and to Kirstie Meehan, Archivist, National Galleries of Scotland, for their help in researching this work.