Cadell painting sells for over £200k

AN oil painting by the Capital-born Colourist Francis Cadell – who died penniless – has fetched more than £200,000 at an auction.

Cadell’s The White Room was completed around 1913, and depicts a fashionable woman sitting in the artist’s first studio in George Street.

It was sold at yesterday’s Bonhams Art Sale to a Scottish collector, whose winning bid of £205,250 was made over the phone.

Cadell was born in Edinburgh in 1883 and died in poverty in 1937.

A Bonhams spokesman said: “The White Room is one of a series relating to Cadell’s monumental Afternoon, an interior celebrating the genteel and rarefied pre-war Edinburgh in which the artist revelled.

“The woman in the picture also appears as one of three in the larger work.

“Her features in the painting are indistinct as Cadell used figures principally as motifs within a decorative whole.”