Visual art review: FCB Cadell, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art/The Scottish Gallery

THE Scottish Colourists are so often treated as a unit with four almost interchangeable parts we have begun to lose sight of them as individuals. But now, following the current Fergusson show at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, a major Cadell retrospective has opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. The process of reinstating them as separate artists has properly begun.

Apart from a recent exhibition at the Portland Gallery in London, this is the first major show devoted to Cadell in a public gallery since in 1942. If this is a sad story of neglect, be sure that the market has not ignored him. A spectacular painting of an interior dated 1912 sold recently at Bonhams for £340,000, a fairly typical price.

There are around 100 pictures in this show. Most are oil paintings, but there are also drawings, watercolours and photographs – of the Cadell family, for instance, or the artist on Iona in his kilt. In addition, there are also objects that he owned and which appear in his paintings; a silver tea service, for instance, or a small blue-and-white Japanese tea set. There are also documents displayed in the library, including several letters reflecting on his troubled finances. He liked to live elegantly and surround himself with beautiful things, but was always dependent on sales for his living. When the art market collapsed with the wider economy in 1929, his good taste prevailed over his financial management. When he died in 1937, aged just 54, Cadell was pretty well broke.

His exhibiting career began in 1902, but his art first really took off during a visit to Venice in 1910. His Venice pictures are brilliant, fluid and vivid with light and colour. He seems to paint rapidly, yet his touch is always absolutely sure. Every flick of colour is exactly placed and precisely shaped, yet seems as free as the breeze and the sunshine it records. Cadell showed these pictures on his return to Edinburgh with limited success, but then deployed this new brilliance in a series of marvellous interiors. Indeed, he established himself then as one of the greatest painters of the city, though not so much of the tourist views, but of the elegant New Town interiors that he made his home.

His first address was 130 George Street. He furnished it, albeit sparely, with mirrors, crystal chandeliers, antique furniture and beautiful objects, painted the walls lilac and covered the floors with glossy black linoleum. We see this in pictures like Interior, 130 George Street and The White Sofa.

As he did in the latter picture, he also frequently brought further animation to these sparkling interiors by introducing beautiful women in marvellous clothes. These are not portraits, simply a brilliant feminine presence inhabiting and enhancing the room. The Black Hat is a masterpiece in this genre. A woman, painted in three-quarter length, stands, hand on hip, by the mantelpiece. She is wearing a gold suit with a red rose, black collar, white gloves and a black hat with a white plume. The mirror behind her is a homage to Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergères. Impressionism had passed into the mainstream by now, but Manet was still a powerful example.

Cadell started to visit Iona in 1912. The island became his inspiration and his second home and except when he was prevented, first by the war and later by illness, he spent the summers there for the rest of his life. The first pictures he painted there – The North End, Iona, for instance – are composed with sweeping bands of brilliant blue and white parallel to the horizon. Though so different in mood, they echo the radical simplicity of Whistler’s Nocturnes.

Entranced by the constantly changing light on the rocks, the white sand and the luminous blue sea, Cadell in turn entrances us. But his response was not only to the physical beauty of the place. He had no time for religion, but nor was he indifferent to the status of Iona as the navel of Scottish culture. He wore his kilt there, not merely for comfort, but to declare his allegiance. He was very much a Scottish artist, inspired by compatriots like William McTaggart and Arthur Melville. McTaggart died in 1910 and a memorial show was held in the same gallery as Cadell showed his Venice pictures. Arthur Melville was a family friend and godfather to one of his siblings.

War service interrupted Cadell’s career. His vivid, summary caricatures of soldiers and army life, the only overt testimony to his experience, conceal its true horror and as soon as he could he returned to painting and indeed to Iona. He also went with Peploe to Cassis in the south of France. The pictures he painted there are beautiful, but lack the vigour of his Iona paintings. Perhaps the steady sunshine and flat colours of the south did not move him as did the ever-changing light of Iona, which on his return inspired such wonderful paintings as Ben More from Iona. Even so, his style changed. He painted the rocks on the beaches as sharply as though they were rocks in a zen garden. His Edinburgh pictures became flatter and more tightly organised. Except for his summers on Iona, still life became his principal vehicle, too. In Rose and Lacquer Screen, the rose and its green leaves are as flat and formal as a Japanese screen behind them. This picture is almost abstract, but, perhaps anxious for his market, he then stepped back from this degree of modernist formality. Nevertheless he also painted a series of stunningly original still lives. Still Life with a Lacquer Screen is a typical example. It is composed with the same screen, plus a dark blue jug of anemones, a pink bowl and a dark green cloth. A chair painted vermillion is cut off by the frame. With percipience unexpected at the time, the anonymous critic of the Times praised this kind of composition as “like a musical arrangement” and music is exactly what these compact, flawlessly brilliant pictures resemble.

As if to endorse the comparison in The Orange Blind, the outstanding picture of this period, Cadell himself introduces a musician. The setting is the grand double drawing room of the house in Ainslie Place which was his second Edinburgh address. An elegant woman dressed in black with a wide black hat sits on a chaise-longue. The pianist is beyond the folded double doors. Beyond him, a blind drawn against the sunlight glows orange. The shadows of the window’s astragals make a formal grid from which everything else in the picture down to the silver tea service in the foreground seems to depend. The composition is a spectacular piece of pictorial architecture. It links this gracious New Town drawing room back to the original from which its proportions derive, the Palladian analogy of architecture with music.

Perhaps the financial troubles of Cadell’s later years affected his confidence. His painting becomes less bold, his colour less startling and his composition a little more staid. As Peploe did, too, he leans increasingly on Cézanne, but he could still bring off something quite brilliant like The Edge of the Wood, for instance, or construct a superb interior like The Hall, Strachur. The Dean Gallery’s gloomy attics are not really a fitting place for him, but this show does at last acknowledge a true master.

Meanwhile, a small Cadell exhibition at the Scottish Gallery has a number of fine pictures, including several lovely watercolours, posters he did for McBrayne’s Steamers and a marvellously wicked caricature of the painter James Paterson: a summary profile, a long angular nose with a drip on the end, empty space and a little splash at the bottom of the page.

Rating (SNGMA): ****

Rating: (TSG): ****

• SNGMA show until 18 March, 2012; Scottish Gallery show until 2 November