FRANCIS CAMPBELL BOILEAU CADELL R.S.A., R.S.W. (SCOTTISH 1883-1937) ◆
STILL LIFE (THE TULIP)
£62,700
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale: 08 June 2023 | From 18:00
Description
Signed, signed and inscribed verso, oil on board
Dimensions
36cm x 43cm (14in x 17in)
Provenance
Provenance:
Acquired by Mrs R A Workman from the 1923 Leicester Galleries exhibition
Portland Gallery, London
Private Collection, U.K.
Exhibited:
The Leicester Galleries, London, Paintings by S. J. Peploe, F. C. B. Cadell and Leslie Hunter, January 1923, no.38 (as 'Tulips')
Footnote
Note: F. C. B. Cadell, like his fellow Scottish Colourist and close friend S. J. Peploe, was a master of the still life genre. As seen in Still Life (The Tulip) and Still Life with Tulips, he created images of arresting beauty by way of carefully chosen, arranged and depicted props, including favoured and highly-coloured flowers, fruit and ceramics.
These paintings illustrate the significant development in Cadell’s practice after demobilisation and moving to 6 Ainslie Place in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town in 1920. Moreover, it was with works from this period that he established his reputation as one of Scotland’s most important artists of the twentieth century. Cadell decorated and furnished his magnificent quarters with aplomb and celebrated its interiors and objects d’art in images characterised by a new firmer technique, flatter rendering of form and use of saturated colour.
As Alice Strang has explained:
This marked change is thought to have been encouraged by Cadell’s new surroundings, by his close collaboration with Peploe immediately after the war, by his interest in the Art Deco movement, and possibly in response to the squalor of the trenches. (Alice Strang, F. C. B. Cadell, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2011, p.40)
Cadell and Peploe had met in Edinburgh by 1909 and these two paintings pay testament to the closeness of their friendship, especially in the early 1920s; Peploe lived a short distance away from Ainslie Place, in India Street. At this time both were drawn to the visual possibilities of tulips, the only flower which continues to grow after being cut. This phenomenon gives rise to the graceful arabesques of their stems which Cadell depicted so deftly. The forms of the flower heads, the layering of their petals and the dense colouring of their leaves also provided an inspiring source of silhouette, colour and mark-making.
Still Life (The Tulip) is an image of extraordinary modernity; its tight handling, brilliant palette and suppression of volume embody the Art Deco style before the exhibition from which that term was derived was mounted in Paris in 1925. It may be set before a wall on the ground floor of Ainslie Place, which Cadell is known to have painted dark blue, green and brown above a light grey floor. The internal framing device around the jug is believed to be an empty white frame, of the type which Cadell often used for the presentation of his work. The cropped, asymmetric composition sets up a striking relationship between tulip head and fruit, whose brilliant colour stands out against the dark background and tabletop.
As Strang has continued:
There are precedents in Art Deco painting and the lacquer work of Jean Dunand, but these still lifes are really Cadell’s own creation and count among the most remarkable paintings in British art of the period. (Strang, op.cit., p.41)
A label on its reverse reveals that Still Life (The Tulip) was included in the key exhibition, Paintings by S. J. Peploe, F. C. B. Cadell and Leslie Hunter (working title Three Scottish Artists) held at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1923. It was organised by A. J. McNeill Reid, son of the Glasgow-based dealer Alexander Reid and did much to secure the artists’ standing in the English art world. Cadell showed thirty works, of which he recorded the sale of five, for a total of £180, all to Alexander Reid, in his Register of Pictures (1923 no.s 8-12, Private Collection on long-loan to the National Galleries of Scotland).