The Cadell Pink - A Scottish Colourist's bowl and the colour it names for your walls

In late April the blossom trees across Edinburgh come into flower, and for two or three weeks the city holds a particular pink. Not the pink of summer roses or autumn dahlias — something cooler and more fleeting than that. The colour of blossom against grey stone under a northern sky.

It is the same pink that F.C.B. Cadell saw in anemones and a bowl in his Edinburgh studio a hundred years ago and placed in a still life.

Still Life with Anemones is not a showy painting. Cadell places his objects on a table: the pink bowl, the anemones, a few other things. He paints them in light from the north in his studio at 6 Ainslie Place, the Regency townhouse on the Moray Estate that he decorated in the bold colours of the 1920s.

The pink Cadell kept returning to is not difficult to find in Scotland if you know what you are looking for. Once you have found it, you will find it everywhere: in the blossom outside the window, in a piece of glass on a sill, even in the particular light of a Scottish stormy sky.

If you want to bring this pink onto a Scottish wall — and you should — Farrow & Ball offer you two versions of it. Nancy's Blushes, No.278, their truest pink, is a slightly paler than bowl colour seen here on the inside of the cabinet. Calamine, No.230, is the lighter blossom colour: paler, with a slightly grey undertone - seen here on the outer cabinet and the walls.

Cadell would have recognised either.

The blossom will be gone in a week or two — that is the nature of it, and part of the appeal. But the bowl on the shelf remains. The paint on the wall remains. The particular pink that Cadell kept returning to is not a seasonal colour. It is a Scottish colour. It simply announces itself most clearly in spring, when the city reminds you it was there all along.