A NEW record for the work of Scottish Colourist FCB Cadell has been set at auction, with one of his paintings selling for £874,000.

Reflection, from 1915, was part of a sale of a collection of Colourist works that sold for £4.5m at an auction at Sotherby's.

The auctioneers, in London, said that the sale from the Harrison Collection had exceeded expectations.

Reflection was given an estimate of up to £600,000.

The sale of the painting for nearly £900,000 overtook a previous auction record set by the similarly named ‘Reflections’, sold at Sotheby’s in 2013 for £686.500.

The painting was the top lot in a sale of ‘The Colourists: Pictures from the Harrison Collection’, a group of over 30 pictures which formed "one of the most exceptional collections of Scottish Colourist works in private ownership", Sotherby's said.

The Harrison Collection was assembled in the 1920s and 1930s by Major Ion Harrison, an important patron and close friend of the artists.

The works were passed down through the family, and remained together, until recently, at Croft House in Helensburgh.

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell lived from 1883 to 1937, and lived and worked in Edinburgh.

Cadell's The White Room, also from 1915, sold for £670,000, above its estimate, while The Pink Azaleas, painted a decade later, made £394,000.

Works by another leading Colourist, Samuel Peploe, also sold with high prices: Trees, Antibes, and Michaelmas Daisies and Oranges, which sold for £586,000 and £490,000.

The collection on sale contained 31 works and was sold at the Modern British Art auction.

Major Ion R. Harrison was Glasgow ship owner who first encountered the work of the Colourist artists in 1921 when, encouraged by his friend Dr Thomas Honeyman, later the director of Glasgow's art galleries, he attended an exhibition at ‘Alex. Reid & Lefevre’ on West Street in Glasgow of paintings by Peploe.

Harrison purchased his first work by Peploe three years later, followed by a number of paintings by Hunter.

Not long after Harrison purchased his first painting by Cadell, The Pink Azaleas.

The Colourists term describes the work of Cadell, Fergusson, Peploe and Hunter, but it was coined in 1948 when three of the four were already dead.

They were all inspired by French painting, and in 1924, they exhibited their works together for the first time, in an exhibition entitled Les Peintres de l’Ecosse Moderne at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris.