Showing an aptitude for drawing at an early age, he was largely self-taught, receiving only elementary painting lessons from a family acquaintance.

George, as he was then known, showed an aptitude for drawing when very young and when he was about thirteen, his mother arranged for him to have painting lessons with a lady acquaintance.

Evidently, the tragic deaths sealed the matter, and the remaining family departed for California via New York on 1 September 1892, aboard the SS Ethiopia.

Hunter moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 1899 and began making a living primarily as a newspaper and journal illustrator.

[4] He counted among his friends and acquaintances, journalist Will Irwin, early photographer Arnold Genthe, poet Gelett Burgess, as well as significant literary figures such as Bret Harte and Jack London, all members of the San Francisco Bohemian Club.

In 1902, Hunter became part of a group of artists that included Maynard Dixon, Gottardo Piazzoni, Xavier Martinez and Arthur Putnam.

However, Hunter's early work was destroyed in the fire that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and he returned to Scotland shortly afterwards, settling in Glasgow.

[4] In November 1913 the influential art dealer Alexander Reid gave Hunter his first one-man-show, at his gallery at West George Street.

[9] During the 1920s, Hunter began to be associated with a group of three other artists: John Duncan Fergusson, F. C. B. Cadell, and Samuel Peploe.

[21] In 1922, Hunter began to make a series of trips to mainland Europe, where he visited Paris, Venice, Florence and the Riviera.

[8] Hunter's visits abroad produced a large number of paintings and his style changed noticeably in this period of European travel as he began using dabs of colour placed instinctively to portray underlying form.

Walter Sickert, in his introduction to the exhibition, wrote that "Hunter uses the refractory ... to inspired ends on normal and traditional lines".

[24] However, shortly after returning to the French Riviera in 1929, Hunter suffered a severe breakdown, forcing his sister to bring him home to Scotland in September.

He recovered, and began to paint a number of portraits of his friends, including one of Dr Tom Honeyman, the Director of the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum from 1939 until 1954.

[10] Shortly before his death, the Glasgow Herald commented that while Hunter was already "well known as a painter of landscape and still-life," his move to portrait painting would "cause a good deal of interest and discussion.

The art critic of the Glasgow Herald described the "varied and uneven genius" of the painter, and praised one painting as having been executed with "such a freedom and economy of touch one cannot well see how any amount of extra thought or technical application could have bettered it.

Later, however, in common with the other members of the Scottish colourists movement, he was heavily influenced by contemporary French artists like Monet[33] and Matisse, and his paintings began to make bolder and more energetic use of colour.

[25] His brush style was influenced by the French avant garde and, especially in his later work, is described by art critics as '"open and free" and "energetic".