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.