National Galleries of Scotland

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell is one of the four artists known as the Scottish Colourists, along with JD Fergusson, GL Hunter and SJ Peploe. They all spent time in France early on in their careers and had direct contact with French painting from Manet and the Impressionists to Matisse and the Fauves. They shared a preference for bright colour and pronounced brushwork and are recognised as being amongst the most important modern Scottish artists.

Exhibitions of the work of Peploe and Fergusson will be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in autumn 2012 and 2013 respectively.

This is the first solo exhibition of Cadell’s work to be held in a public gallery in seventy years, following the retrospective held at the National Gallery of Scotland in 1942. Cadell is perhaps the most elegant of the Colourists. He is renowned for his stylish portrayals of Edinburgh New Town interiors and the sophisticated society that occupied them; equally celebrated are his vibrantly coloured, daringly simplified still lifes and figure studies of the 1920s and his evocative depictions of his beloved island of Iona.