Move fast to snap up one of Elizabeth Blackadder’s sleek cats at the Scottish Gallery

If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021 at the age of 89, knew it too. Her sinuous, characterful cat pictures, watercolours mostly but also oils and prints, helped cement her place as the nation’s favourite painter. She was an establishment favourite too, becoming the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy in London. In 1995, her cats adorned a set of Royal Mail stamps and, in 2001, she became the first woman to be appointed as Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner, a position unique to the Royal Household of Scotland, previously occupied by the likes of Henry Raeburn, David Wilkie and David Young Cameron. In 2012 she accepted a commission to paint the then first minister Alex Salmond’s Christmas card, following in the footsteps of Alasdair Gray and Jack Vettriano.

No wonder some of her fellow artists occasionally looked enviously upon her success and, longingly eyeing her more muscly early work, made dark mutterings about selling out. But it’s daft to dismiss Blackadder as the Vettriano of cats just because of all the calendars and tea towels flying out of gallery gift shops. She didn’t sell out, though her shows frequently did. Her trajectory from semi-abstract landscape painting, heavily influenced by her Edinburgh College of Art tutor William Gillies, to the structured foregrounding of cats and flowers is the journey of an inquisitive artist exploring the world around them and gradually sloughing off the bits that no longer captivate.

A new retrospective exhibition at the Scottish Gallery, where Blackadder exhibited for more than half a century, explores this evolution across more than 60 works, all for sale, alongside a newly commissioned tapestry that celebrates the artist’s long history of creative collaboration with Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios.