This picture illustrates one of Cadell's favourite themes: an elegant, fashionably dressed woman posed in a stylish interior set against a mirror. This Scottish Colourist was the perfect recorder of that glorious prewar epoch when well-to-do society could indulge its leisure activities. Women could not only lunch, but dine, shop, gossip and theatre-go.
Cadell loved women in hats. While his early pictures of society women were often fluid symphonies in white and silver, his 1920s style lost some of the soft romance. Here, he focuses on the sitter, arrayed in fur collar, kid gloves and with a glint of gold hoop earring against an impressive feathered hat, the whole framed by ormolu, blue and white china and pink roses. Pure Hollywood. The picture was bought by Kelvingrove in 1926, the first to be acquired by a public collection. In 1928 Cadell's The Orange Blind was purchased from the Royal Glasgow Institute for #150 by the Hamilton Trustees and given to Kelvingrove.
Cadell came from a prosperous Edinburgh family so felt at home in glitzy drawing rooms. Moreover he was a gregarious chap - voluble, boisterous, witty, stout and good company. Friendship meant a lot to him he acquired many patrons, most notably the Glasgow Boy painter Arthur Melville, Sir Patrick Ford, Ion Harrison and Tom Honeyman, director of Kelvingrove, who coined the term ''The Scottish Colourists'' in 1950.
Despite his work now selling for large sums, in 1937 Cadell died poor, having applied to the Nasmyth Fund for the Relief of Decayed Scottish Artists in 1936.
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