My six shilling canvas is now worth £18k – pity I painted over other 13

Published on Friday 2 October 2009 22:04

TO THE young art student they were just a pile of old paintings bought for a few shillings which he eagerly whitewashed to use as cheap canvases.

But one of the pictures – a colourful portrait of a woman – caught his eye and, rather than paint over it he hung it on his wall.

Half a century later the painting, which turned out to be by the Scottish Colourist FCB Cadell, has been valued at nearly 20,000.

Now Alastair Reid, who went on to become a leading television director, has been left wondering about the other 13 he covered up.

This month, Mr Reid put the only survivor up for auction.

The former Edinburgh College of Art student and his mother singled out the picture soon after they bought it for just six shillings as part of a job lot at auction in the 1950s.

The picture was signed and they immediately decided to save it, he said yesterday.

But the other pictures were painted over for reuse because old canvases were cheaper than new.

"I often think about it," he said. "I was about to go to the ECA, and I was looking for old canvases to paint. The Cadell stood out from the others as being full of colour, and beautifully painted."

The Cadell painting, measuring 14x17 inches, dates from the mid 1920s and is called The Yellow Scarf, according to a label on the back. While it looks unfinished, lightly painted with the face heavily blurred, it carries Cadell's distinctive style.

It was apparently shown at the Royal Scottish Academy's festival exhibition in 1949, owned by an RTG Paterson, and it is unclear how it ended up with a lot of overlooked canvases.

Mr Reid thinks it may show Bertia Hamilton Don-Wauchope, the favourite model of the artist famous for his impressionist portraits of Edinburgh interiors and society ladies, as well as his beloved Iona.

But the striking auburn hair, and large gold hoop earrings could also identify her as a model called May Easter.

Mr Reid, 70, left the ECA and went on to theatre school in Bristol. He became a Bafta award-winning director of programmes like Traffik, Inspector Morse episodes and Tales of the City.

Paintings by Cadell and his fellow Scottish Colourists, such as SJ Peploe, were popular in Scotland but were not strong sellers in the post-war British art market.

Only in the 1970s did their prices begin to soar, with the record price for a Cadell of 301,250 set last August at Sotheby's for his painting Carnations.

"Gradually, over the years, I realised that the Scottish Colourists were of great interest," said Mr Reid, who owns about 40 other paintings of lesser value.

It is the much-loved picture's growing insurance value that lead him to put it up for auction at Lawrence's auction house in Crewkerne, Somerset, where he lives nearby. It is expected to fetch between 12-18,000.

"It became clear to us that the insurance company were thinking of double locks, and outside alarms all because of this one picture," he said.