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After serving in the Great War, Cadell returned to Iona with fellow painter and friend SJ Peploe every year from 1919 until 1932. Only requiring a small board for each sheet to be stretched, all his painting paraphernalia could be carried in a small bag as he went about the island. Any who have visited will attest any routes leaving the relative security of the machar are rough, rocky and dangerous, particularly around the North End. Here he has crossed the Island to the Atlantic coast, to Port Ban just north of the Bay at the Back of the Ocean. There is a deep, secluded bay and beautiful sandy beach divided by a rocky shoal in the centre. Cadell painted here many times including a well-known oil of the high rocky promontory behind the bay, the site of the iron age Dun Bhuirg. Here he has set up on the south of the bay on the tidal Eilan Didal looking north over the quiet waters of the best swimming beach on the island. The range of blues are highly characteristic, the waters reflecting the summer sky.
The almost complete lack of ‘angst’ in his work seems to derive from an intense love of life, a sensuous enjoyment of good living and an admiration for men who were masculine and women who were elegant. His subject-matter reflected his hedonism. Guy Peploe
Cadell was born in Edinburgh in 1883 and from an early age, showed a precocious talent for art and was producing very capable watercolours and drawings in his early teens. Half French, he was taken to France and Munich by his mother for artistic education and some very fine, freely painted farmyard paintings date from this early period. Despite his sophistication, Cadell’s most natural habitat was the west Highlands, Iona in particular, and he made only a few painting trips to France after the War. He produced some of his most brilliant Colourist works while staying with the Peploes in Cassis in 1924. Very fashion conscious, his work before 1914 had an Edwardian opulence and breadth unique in Scottish painting. By the twenties his work had a hard edge with clear colour, chiming with the jazz-age, and the compositions have a deco stylishness full of sophistication of concept and originality of palette. He is as original and distinctive a voice as any in Scottish painting.
F.C.B. Cadell & The Scottish Gallery
F.C.B. Cadell first exhibited with The Gallery in 1909, and his second in 1910 showcased his Venetian paintings. The visit to Venice had been productive and represented (as with Peploe and Fergusson in Royan in the same year) his full engagement with a personal impressionism in which colour was used for direct expressionist purpose. His was a precocious early career, brilliant in watercolour, encouraged by Arthur Melville. In oil, his earlier work is characterised by rich medium, broad-brush marks and is high in tone, unlike the more sonorous works of Peploe and Fergusson’s early Edinburgh years. His next exhibition with The Scottish Gallery was not until 1932, at a time when picture sales were in decline due to the Great Depression. Cadell had always been comfortable to be his own agent, using the artist-run Society of Eight for many of his exhibitions of new work, and on Iona, where he spent every summer after The Great War. There he set up a daily exhibition of the fruits of his labour, his manservant Charles Oliver acting as sales agent, selling to the many wealthy summer visitors, like David Russell of Markinch and George Service of Cove.
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