Winter Corrie
By W Cadenhead

The following obituary appeared in The Scotsman newspaper, 2 Feb 2005:

CADENHEAD is an auld name, and Bill Cadenhead was an old-fashioned Angus gentleman. With his death, on the 15 January, Scotland lost a landscape painter and a teacher who was very much part of the land he loved. As a painter, his great subject was the Angus Glens and the Grampians rising beyond - the wall of rocks, the wind, the clouds, the trees, the snow that gave human forms to the mountains he painted so well. Born in 1934 and brought up in Glen lsla, Bill went to Dundee where he studied at Bell Street Technical College shortly before its art department transformed itself into Duncan of Jordonstone College of Art. As a student, Bill displayed a special aptitude as an anatomical draftsman and, after being awarded his diploma in 1955, was offered a post-diploma scholarship. During the summer of 1956, hitch-hiking in his kilt, Bill spent several happy months in Tuscany, looking at the paintings and the architecture of a great civilisation, and getting the occasional free drink and meal - on the strength of the service other men in kilts had given in Florence, Borgo San Lorenzo and the Apennines just a dozen years before. Such gestures bonded him to the great European artistic tradition and to his own East Highland ancestry. In 1957 Bill won the David Murray Landscape Scholarship and was offered a place at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he studied for three years. In 1961 he returned to Scotland to begin his career as a landscape painter; funding himself by part-time teaching at Duncan of Jordanstone. At the college he worked closely with distinguished painters such as Alberto Morrocco, David McClure, Gordon Cameron and Peter Collins, but his special pal was Willie Duff, the anatomist from Pittenweem, and together they kept this most academic of art traditions alive in Dundee, long after it had mouldered elsewhere. Bill was an artist with skills, and skill is a great thing in art. His problem was that he did not have patrons or a society that could or would help to shape the skills he had. Medieval Italy had them, old Pictland (in the time of the stones) had them, but not modern Scotland. Thus, he was forced back on teaching, and in 1971 he was made a full-time lecture at Dundee’s School of Drawing and Painting.

Bill married his wife, Vi, a year later and they moved out to the Rowans, at Muir of Lownie, near Forfar, where the garden and landscape were to give them both endless delight. It was a long and happy marriage, and while it is never easy to be married to an artist, Vi was a wonderful partner to Bill - as his paintings and his drawings show. From Muir of Lownie it was a pleasant drive down to Dundee - where for 30 years ‘Willie’ Cadenhead was a dedicated, admired and much loved teacher of drawing and painting. And, it was an even finer drive up into the hills where, out in the open, canvas strapped down against the wind - he would paint. He embraced "weather", loved snow like a child, watched the deer coming down before the storm, and coming home taped the barometer before recording the height of the mercury column. He exhibited, to moderate success, all over Scotland, in England, America and Canada, but sales and marketing were never his prime concerns. He was a painter - in love with the landscape of his boyhood and he would observe it, record it and give it honour. He wrote: "Most of my work is produced on location in response to transient effects of light and weather - presenting individual mountain groups in the hinter/end of the Angus Glens."

Bill knew the people who lived in the glens. As a student in the holidays he worked on the sheep farms and beat-up the grouse: as a boy he remembered wonderful, moonlit Hogmanays in Glen lsla - going up one side of the glen and coming back down the other, in deep snow - stopping at almost every house. His documentation of the Angus landscape compliments that of James McIntosh Patrick, but more in the manner of the 19th-century master of the sheep, Farquarson. In his last years Bill painted his garden many times, in oils and in pastels. Last year, Bill won the Shell Prize at Aberdeen Artists Exhibition. This month, the Meffen Gallery in Forfar is to show a retrospective of his work. It is a great pity he will not see it - but many others will. Bill’s life will be long remembered and his art long treasured. I remember him introducing his mother to the poet Hamish Henderson at the memorial exhibition of Ian Eadie, at Duncan of Jordanstone. On learning, or recognising, that she came from Glen lsla a great smile spread over Hamish’s face as he leaned back to sing:

"Busk, busk bonnie lassie And come awa’ wi’ me And I’ll take ye to Glen Isle And bonnie Glenshee..." Their joint delight brought the old lady to tears: Perthshire and Angus made beautiful in song - as the years fell away and only the rock and the great continuum remained. These things William lived, these things he painted.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/william-cadenhead-1-673696