Portrait of a Lady in Black

The sitter in this painting is Bertha Hamilton Don-Wauchope (1864 - 1944), an Edinburgh model who posed regularly for Cadell from about 1911 to 1926. The distinctive mauve-coloured walls indicate that the portrait was painted in the artist's studio in Ainslie Place, Edinburgh, where the artist lived from 1920. After the First World War, Cadell abandoned his feathery impressionistic manner for this style, using bold colours and scarcely-visible brushstrokes. Cadell often included the names of colours in the titles of his paintings. This practice had been made popular by Whistler and became fashionable during the Edwardian period.