The fresh-to-the-market group offers an overview of the artist’s career, and includes an important studio interior and five superb oils of Iona.

Cadell was born in 1883 to an Edinburgh family and, unusually, was supported in his chosen vocation by both parents. At the behest of Glasgow School painter Arthur Melville, Cadell’s mother took him to Paris for three years at the tender age of 15 where he worked in Julian’s celebrated atelier. Thereafter, despite short trips to

Venice and the South of France, Cadell focused almost entirely on Scottish landscape and the bourgeois lifestyle of his peers, and reflected both with a singular panache.

Dr T J Honeyman, biographer of the Scottish Colourists and the man who coined the term, recalled of Cadell: ‘To paint pictures was not enough. One had to express one’s idea of decoration in everything. He made his studio a work of art’. (Three Scottish Colourists, London, 1950, p89.)

Cadell had utilised this view in his sumptuous ‘Afternoon’ of 1913, transforming the working studio into a pale, chic Edwardian salon with three elegant women, and afternoon tea on the same foreground table (crisply draped, of course).

Cadell first visited Iona in 1912, and spent much of his summer time there during subsequent years. He quickly became a well-kent and popular figure in the tiny community, customising a cottage into a studio and working on the beaches resplendent in kilt and silk shirt.

These timeless pictures, particularly of the North End, rejoice in spectacular sunlight and atmospheric effects on clear blue water, white sand, rocks and machair, and the artist

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