Iona is three miles long. It has no mountain worth the name, one village, and a ferry from Fionnphort that takes ten minutes. It is also the most painted island in Scotland, and the reason is a colour that photographs badly and has to be seen.
The colour is real
The beaches at the north end of the island — the Bay at the Back of the Ocean, Traigh an t-Suidhe, the white strand below the Machair — are made of shell sand. It is pale, almost white, and it sits under shallow water on a bright day.
What that does to light is not subtle. The water reads as turquoise, then jade, then a hard green-blue where it deepens, in bands with visible edges. Against it the rock is pink Lewisian gneiss and the machair is a flat acid green.
Every visitor who has tried to photograph it has come home with something that looks wrong. The painters had the opposite problem: they had to decide whether anyone would believe them.
Cadell got there first
F. C. B. Cadell began painting on Iona around 1912. He decided early to paint the colour flat and undiluted — no atmospheric softening, no grey in the shadows, the turquoise laid down as turquoise. It is a decision that only works if you commit completely, and he did.
S. J. Peploe joined him from 1920. The two of them went out most summers for the next fifteen years, painting the same handful of views over and over: the rocks on the north shore, the sound with Mull and Ben More behind it, the sand at low tide.
Peploe approached it as he approached a table of flowers — as a composition problem to be solved. His Iona pictures are more structured than Cadell's, the rocks blocked in like still-life objects. Cadell's are more direct and more dangerous.
Why the same view, again and again
Because the light is never the same twice, and because a painter working the same subject annually is doing something different from a painter recording a place.
Peploe spent forty years rearranging a jug and some roses. Iona is that discipline moved outdoors. The subject was fixed precisely so the painting could be about handling.
The older Iona
There is another reason people come. St Columba landed on Iona in 563 and founded the monastery from which most of northern Britain was converted. The Book of Kells is widely thought to have been begun there. Forty-eight Scottish kings are traditionally said to be buried in the Reilig Odhráin, though the number is a medieval claim rather than an archaeological one.
The painters were mostly not interested in any of that. Cadell and Peploe painted the beach.
What to hang
Cadell's view across to Mull and Ben More is the picture that does the most work on a wall, because the colour is the subject and it holds a room from across it. Peploe's rocky shore is the quieter one, and better in a small space where you can stand close enough to see the construction.
Both are landscape-format, and both look best given room — 60 × 90 cm if the wall allows it.
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