The road to the Isles

Entranced by the purple-shadowed hills and rugged coastlines of the Highlands, earlyand mid-20th-century artists challenged the stereotype of the Romantic North with modern works that deserve to be better known,

- Mary Miers

TO the chagrin of many Scots, the Victorian stereotype of the Romantic North remains the prevailing image of the Highlands.

The best-known paintings of the region are still those sublime landscapes by Horatio McCulloch or Edwin Landseer, featuring a ruined castle or stags.

One exception is the group of luminous works by the Scottish Colourists, who introduced their Mediterranean palette to the Hebrides in the 1920s. They were not the first painters to discover Iona—see, for example, the lovely views by John Duncan, who first visited the sacred isle in 1903 and would make it the setting of some of his most important Symbolist works. Francis Cadell, who first went in 1912, wrote to his fellow Colourist Samuel Peploe: ‘When the War is over I shall go to the Hebrides, recover some virtues I have lost. There is something marvellous about those western seas. Oh, Iona. We must all go together.’ Peploe joined him there in 1920 and, over the next 15 years, they made regular summer painting trips. Looking out from the rugged foreshore over dazzling white sands and turquoise sea to the purple-shadowed hills of Mull, they captured the revelatory light and chromatic intensity of this beautiful seaboard as no artists had done before.