Download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue - The Scottish Gallery

JOAN EARDLEY
edinburgh
london
3 – 27 April 2013 1 – 17 MAY 2013
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ
Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
8 Bennet Street, London SW1A 1RP
Tel 020 7493 1888 Email art@portlandgallery.com
www.portlandgallery.com
Cover: Children and Chalked Wall, c.1962 (detail), mixed media on paper, 36 x 56 cms
Left: Flowers by the Wayside, c.1961 (detail), oil on canvas, 61 x 56 cms

Foreword
50 years have now passed since the death of Joan Eardley in August 1963.
In one important sense her light, that burned so brightly, is still bright
today; her work seems as urgent, honest and enthralling as when it was
made. She would have been little concerned with her artistic legacy being a
person entirely caught up with the drama and tribulation of the process of
making art. It was the process that truly mattered; sometimes her drawings
were given to the children who thronged through her Townhead studio, to
be later used to light a fire in the paternal hearth, or discarded paintings
on board used to lag the loft space of her Catterline cottage. But she was a
passionate, driven painter who worked tirelessly, no doubt to the cost of her
health; the next picture was the only one that mattered. These character
traits were not at the cost of humanity; indeed her work could not have
been made without a deep sympathy for her subject and the wider human
condition. Family, friends, collectors and professionals within the art world
would have helped keep her flame alive and ensure that many more can
discover her genius.
This exhibition, which complements a new publication by Christopher
Andreae, celebrates Joan Eardley. There are works from Townhead to
Catterline and from studies abroad in France and Italy.
We are delighted to have London’s Portland Gallery as our partner in this
exhibition. For the last thirty years The Portland has championed the work
of 20th century and contemporary Scottish artists so is the natural venue
for the London showing of this exhibition.
Both The Scottish Gallery and Portland Gallery would particularly like
to thank Christopher Andreae, Joan Eardley’s family and James Morrison.
GUY PEPLOE
Director, The Scottish Gallery
Joan Eardley painting in Catterline. Photograph by Audrey Walker
3

Shipbuilder’s Street, c.1951
oil on canvas, 94 x 34.25 cms

Introduction
Joan Eardley’s association with The Scottish Gallery began as long ago
as 1955. The Gallery since then has exhibited her work in a procession
of shows both during her lifetime and after, with only one pause of any
duration – between 1996 and 2007. And now, fifty years after she died,
this Gallery, in association with London’s Portland Gallery, has once
again brought together a wonderful, representative selection of her work
from private collections. All these works are for sale. This is no small
achievement because many private Eardley owners display a firmly held
reluctance, despite rising sales figures, to consider parting with their
Eardleys.
Her appeal persists. She can no longer be justifiably described as
just a remarkable painter of her time (the late forties, the fifties and the
early sixties). She is, lastingly, an irresistible, fresh and original artist by
any standard, without any call for such qualifiers (even if they are not
intentionally demeaning) as ‘Scottish’, ‘twentieth century’ and ‘woman
artist’.
This exhibition ranges across the wide scope of subject-matter in
Eardley’s work – and it is significant that she never abandoned the necessity
of ‘the subject’. She felt strongly that it was truth to her subjects that would
ensure that her style of painting and drawing was entirely her own, a very
direct encounter or entanglement with individual slum children, with
profoundly sleeping babies, summer fields deep in wild grasses and flowers,
with dangerously surging, rock-crashing waves, weighty, dark-clouded
sunsets, burgeoning street life, tall red sandstone and soot-black tenements
or a complexity of salmon nets drying on the shoreline.
She was never outside her subjects looking in. She literally immersed
herself for extended periods in places that fed her art. But her themes were
not limited to the local. She painted the sea. She drew deprived children.
The fact that these restlessly alive, acutely observed wonders in paint
or pastel were achieved in Catterline or Glasgow never made her into a
topographical artist. She expressed a horror of being thought ‘provincial’
and cannot be accused of being so. Her work touches, with a subtle,
realistic balance of sensitive affection and ferocious energy, on something
immediate and universal.
Christopher Andreae
5

During her Travelling Scholarship from 1948-49 Eardley was based in Florence in the friendly
Pensione Morandi from where she made visits to Assisi, Padua, Forte dei Marmi and Venice. Our
painting was exhibited in the show at the School of Art Museum when her drawings were warmly
praised by Alice Sturrock for the Glasgow Herald and from where it was acquired. A large if not
wholly successful painting of beggars outside the Cathedral was made after her return and Joan
felt she had failed in Venice: the weight of who had been before and the historical and architectural
profusions she perhaps found oppressive. In this drawing she has typically not chosen to draw the
distinctive façade of the Cathedral, or the Square but instead focuses on a black-clad seated woman.
6

1 St Mark’s Square, Venice, 1949
oil on board, 16.5 x 18.5 cms
signed with initials lower right
illustrated
Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries (London), 2013, p88
Included in her GSA exhibition were eleven drawings and paintings of Venice.
7

Balloch on Loch Lomond is a short journey from the family home in
Bearsden and Joan visited with a post-diploma friend called Joan Tebbit
with whom she also shared life drawing duties at the School as part of her
post-dip year. She often went on similar trips with close friend, Margo
Sandeman. Once again Van Gogh seems an influence as she determinedly
avoids a picture post-card view of the pretty resort.
8

2 Balloch, c.1947-8
oil on canvas, 24 x 33.5 cms
signed lower left and signed & titled verso
exhibited
Glasgow School of Art, 1949; Joan Eardley Memorial Exhibition, Scottish Arts Council, 1964,
(Cat. 19)
provenance
Private Collection, Glasgow
9

This energetic, heavily worked drawing belongs
to a summer visit to Cologne du Gers, in the Gers
Departement not far from the Pyrenees where
Eardley worked with Dorothy Steel in 1951.
The pantile roofs are typical of the vernacular
building of the area. Emotionally and stylistically
it surely owes much to Van Gogh, whose major
touring exhibition Joan would have seen at
Kelvingrove in 1948. It belongs with the drawings
she made in France and Italy on her travels but
has a new maturity and ambition which looks
forward to her expressionist engagement with
the landscape already begun in Catterline the
year before.
10

3 Red Roofs, Trees and Cow, 1951
mixed media on paper, 39 x 48 cms
signed lower left
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 101)
11

4 French Fisherman, 1951
pastel, 12 x 9 cms
illustrated
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd,
1988, p43
Exhibited
Joan Eardley, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, March 1985
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 299); Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow
In 1951, Joan Eardley and Dorothy Steel spent several months in France, at Cologne du Gers.
“The pace of life in the French village was slow, indeed, but ‘there are many nice things here and
one can become absorbed into the slow pace of things very easily – the slow moving bullocks and
the men who move as slowly, and walk like them I amble along like a bullock myself – and then I
suddenly think of my tenements and my wee boys’.”
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd,
1988, p43
12

Joan was introduced to Port Glasgow by Dorothy Steel, who had a studio
there, in 1950 and she spent much time there drawing. A few years later she
completed an ambitious picture, Children, Port Glasgow, exhibited at The
Scottish Gallery in a group show for the International Festival; Six Young
Scottish Painters in 1955 which makes a subject picture out of the same cast
of kids more stylistically treated in Shipbuilder’s Street.
5 Shipbuilder’s Street, c.1951
oil on canvas, 94 x 34.25 cms
signed lower right
illustrated
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing
Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 1988, p40
“The technique in which squarish slabs of pigment could be articulated
and given form by forceful dark lines was developed in paintings like
Shipbuilder’s Street (c.1951), a tall, narrow canvas of street kids playing
against a background of shipbuilding activity. Patches of rust-red
stabbed by brighter scarlet, yellow and cerulean blue stand for the
children playing on the pavement, with a pale grey hull, high on the
stocks behind them, against a dun-coloured sky.”
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing
Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 1988, p39
14

6 Stonehaven Harbour, c.1952
Pen, ink and watercolour drawing, 46 x 54 cms
exhibited
Joan Eardley Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, January 1981, (Cat. 25)
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 226); inscription on verso reads “the harbour is that at
Stonehaven. The boat is the fishing boat ‘Acorn’ KY133 built in 1949 at Anstruther (completed in
six weeks) and fished from that harbour and from Stonehaven by the owner Mr. Henry Gardner
of 1 Rustic Place Anstruther. Mr. Gardner identified the harbour when shown the drawing
29/1/82 and his boat ‘Acorn’ – length 54.3ft / breadth 17.5ft / depth 6.9ft / weight 26.62 tonnes”
16

7 Madeleine, c.1957
pastel on paper, 15.25 x 17.75 cms
exhibited
Joan Eardley Memorial Exhibition, Scottish Arts Council, 1964, (Cat.54)
“The child with pink-and-white complexion and fair hair, obviously professionally cut, must be
a preliminary sketch for the only official portrait commission ever carried out… The Macaulay
Children, painted for their father, William Macaulay of Aitken Dott’s Scottish Gallery which,
by the time the painting was commissioned, in 1957, had become Joan Eardley’s regular shop
window in Edinburgh.”
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd,
1988, p69
19

catterline
Our friendship with Joan began in 1958, when we went to live in Catterline.
My wife Dorothy and I and Joan went to the village at about the same
time. Joan had held an exhibition in the Gaumart Cinema in Aberdeen in
1950 and met Annette Stephen there. She owned ‘The Watch House’, a one
storey building on a promontory to the north of the village, Joan visited
regularly there until she bought a house on the south side of the village
with dramatic views down to the harbour and the cliffs beyond. Although
in recent years the village has become a mecca for many ‘artists’, when we
were there this was not the case. Joan had Angus Neil to stay with her, from
time to time and later Lil Neilson, but in no way could Catterline be called
an artists’ colony. Our jovial conversations rarely touched on painting,
but Joan took a lively interest in our family, our son and daughter were
born during our stay in the village and I remember the first time Dorothy
had John out in his pram. Joan stopped, duly admired the new village
inhabitant and put two half crowns in his pram as a good luck token – a
village custom at this time. Angus Neil, a very good painter, lived next door
to us and asked us when John was three, if he could make a pastel portrait
of him. He made an excellent start to the work, but Joan would not let him
finish. She said he would overwork it and so we were given the fine but
unfinished work. It hangs in my house to this day. Joan was a great artist,
but I remember her as a soft-spoken kind lady, who loved the village and its
people and who was loved in return.
James Morrison
7.1.2013
Joan Eardley and Angus Neil, seated on bench. Photograph by Audrey
Walker. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Archive, Edinburgh
20

8 Nets, Waves and Rocks, c.1961
oil and collage on hardboard, 69 x 91 cms
exhibited
Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery,
Edinburgh, 1964 (Cat. 14)
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 157)
“I always identify Joan with the sea, and
it is a valid identification. There is the
gentle sunlit sea one delights in, in the
summer. And even in bad weather it is
still a summer sea. This was the Joan
that I think everyone knew. This is
the sea most people know. But there
is the magnificent winter sea, in all its
indomitable grandeur and the wild,
turbulent and terrifying splendour.
This was Joan too.”
Audrey Walker, c.1964, Audrey Walker’s
Tribute to Joan Eardley, Joan Eardley by
Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries
(London), 2013, p15
23

Todhead Point is at the south of the Braidon Bay, the next bay immediately
to the south of Catterline Harbour. The lighthouse was built in 1897 and
finally decommissioned in 2007. Eardley was capable of matching the
energy of storm even on a modest scale: waves crash onto the rocks and a
squall obliterates the sunset over the horizon.
9 Todhead Point, c.1957
oil on board, 18.5 x 32.5 cms
signed and dated verso
provenance
Gift from the artist to current owner
24

Joan painting under a washing line, Catterline.
Photograph by Audrey Walker
“The place that I chose to paint in Glasgow is really just a little community
– a little back street where everyone knows everyone and the same thing
seems to be the case in the village where I live in the North-East.
“I find that the more I know a place or the more I know a particular spot,
the more I find to paint. I very often find that I take my paints to a certain
place, begin to paint there, and perhaps by the end of the summer I have
not moved from that place. In fact I have worn a kind of mark in the ground
– there is no grass left. I just leave my paints there overnight and eventually
a studio seems to have arrived outside. I might just turn round in the
middle of a painting and see something else and run back and get another
canvas and do that, but it is still the same spot really, the same feeling that
I am trying to grasp.”
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing Company
(Edinburgh) Ltd, 1988, p76
25

Joan painting in a field, Catterline.
Photograph by Audrey Walker
Eardley painted a great variety of subjects at Catterline and a favourite was the cliff-top fields
sometimes with a blasted hedgerow, beehives or the Watchie on the horizon. Sometimes also with
seedheads pressed into the surface of the paint, or the paint surface deeply scored with palette knife
or brush-end. Many of these works, expressionist in spirit, tachist in execution are also paeans to
nature when the ill-health Joan was suffering lent a sharp, bittersweet poignancy to these highsummer
works.
26

10 Flowers by the Wayside, c.1961
oil on canvas, 61 x 56 cms
signed lower left and signed & titled on label verso
“‘I’ve got a series of paintings going at the end of my old cottage.’ Joan wrote to Margot in 1962.
‘I never seem to find that I want to move. It’s a handy spot as no-one comes near and I can work
away undisturbed. I just go on from one painting to another – just the grasses and the corn – it’s
oats this year, barley it was last year. There’s a wee, windblown tree, and that’s all. But every day
and every week it looks a bit different – the flowers come and the corn grows so it seems silly to
shift about. I just leave my painting table out here and my easel and my palette.’”
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd,
1988, p76
27

Nets at Catterline with pulley at top left. Photograph by
Audrey Walker. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Archive, Edinburgh
There were several other versions of this subject in the 1965 exhibition at Roland Browse and
Delbanco, no. 3 illustrated in the catalogue as Fishing Nets Drying no. II. It was clearly a subject
which appealed greatly, and this informs us about her concerns as an artist. She is not just the
expressionist soul, wringing drama and emotion from her experience of the world, but a sensitive
picture maker who likes to get close to a subject, to go in deep to try to reveal some beauty and order
in the chaos apparent in the nature or the happenstance of the disposition of human detritus along
the shore paths of Catterline. To choose such an unprepossessing subject and make great art from it
speaks of the artist’s modernism as well as her genius.
28

11 Fishing Nets, 1963
oil on board, 48 x 51 cms
signed and dated on verso
illustrated
Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries (London), 2013, p155
provenance
Roland, Browse and Delbanco (bears fragmentary label) possibly Cat.26 in their Joan Eardley
exhibition, May 1963; Private Collection; Messums Gallery, London
29

Catterline’s stone pier was finished by 1841. In 1884 when the industry was at its peak there were
eight herring boats out of Catterline and curing was carried out on a small scale by the local
innkeeper. At high tide with a blow the pier is less dominant visually and for this small, powerful
picture, painted mostly with the knife, Eardley has walked around the cliff-top to the south of the
cottages to look back into the bay.
30

12 Bay, Catterline, 1958
oil on panel, 15 x 30.5 cms
exhibited
Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964, (Cat. 77); Joan Eardley Exhibition,
The Scottish Gallery, 1984
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (EE 225)
31

32
This double-sided picture will belong to the
autumn of 1962; the verso is another field flowers
work which includes the roof and gable end of
The Watchie at top left, by then her home and
studio and today a studio retreat for artists.
The haystack is monolithic, painted with little
regard for picture-making but a commitment
to the physical presence of the subject and her
emotional response to it.

13 Haystack, c.1962
oil on board, 58.5 x 55 cms
signed lower left
33

“Had breakfast and am sitting on our seat. A perfect day so far. I think it may be very hot. No wind and
the sea calm and very beautiful. I mustn’t sit here and write to you – much as I want to. There’s these
old nets to be tackled! Awful thought because I’m frightened of them a bit – but I find on sunny days
such as this that it is only possible to see them in the morning. So I must go.”
Extract from a letter to Audrey Walker, Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries
(London), 2013, p154
34

14 Fishing Nets I, 1963
oil on board, 105 x 110 cms
exhibited
Joan Eardley, Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London, May 1965, (Cat.1)
provenance
Kodak Company, London
35

Townhead
“Traditionally, painting students went there
for inspiration and subject matter – mainly for
romantic reasons, because the flat landscape and
its still, gleaming water, little wind up bridges
and gas lamps felt unlike Glasgow. What Eardley
discovered, however, and soon began to explore
with typical singlemindedness in graphic terms,
was not the romantic, atmospheric canal-scape,
as such. It was that fringe of gaunt tenements and
back-courts, the dark strength of their forms and
the unexpected colour in their peeling masonry,
the sense of movement and the liveliness in their
surfaces as the window-glass darkly sucked in, or
gleamingly rebuffed the daylight. Before long the
inner life implicit in the lines of coloured washing
appeared in the flesh. Insouciant, tattered
urchins presented themselves, chattering, and
the timid ones soon followed, for Joan Eardley
attracted children like insects to a honeypot.”
Cordelia Oliver, Joan Eardley and Glasgow,
Scottish Art Review, Special Number. Vol XIV
no. 3, 1974, p17
Townhead (Scots: Toun-heid) was an area of
Glasgow which lay close to George Square and
the City Chambers going towards Glasgow
Cathedral and the High Street. Being so close
to the city centre, the slums were hard to
avoid. In the 1960’s, Townhead was designated
a Comprehensive Development Area (CDA),
which meant that it would be largely demolished
to make way for modern tower blocks and a
controversial inner city road system. Today, a
few surviving tenements are all that remain of
Townhead.
Joan Eardley took her first studio in Cochrane
Street near the City Chambers in 1949, moving
later to an old photographer’s studio at 204
St James’s Road in Townhead in 1952. Local
industry included a concentration of printing
works and the Sun Foundry on Kennedy Street.
The population of Townhead was at its peak
in 1951 (117 per acre). By the mid 1960’s, the
majority of the buildings and people of Townhead
were gone. Eardley’s powerful drawings and
paintings of urban dereliction in Glasgow
during this period are poignant depictions of
the character of the place, indivisible from the
character of its people. Her studio was top lit
and kept warm with a large stove; the interior
and structure of the building was held up with
scaffolding. She kept a camera in her studio to
capture the surrounding street life, and her fast
moving child subjects; these photographs were
used as reference points for sketches and finished
paintings.
“What is particularly striking about these
photographs, the studies and the final works is
the sense of the protective, adult awareness of
the children. The expressive faces and the direct
stares of the children are remarkable in the
history of British art. There is no social message,
no emotive thrust… The children are symbolic
of a worldly streetwise mode of living… She saw
the ruin and decay of objects as a witness to the
passage of life.”
Joan Eardley 1921-1963, Scottish Masters 6
by Fiona Pearson, 1988, The Trustees of the
National Galleries of Scotland
Joan in her Townhead studio. Pink Jumper
(p54) can be seen top right. Photograph by
Audrey Walker
36

In this image, Eardley can be seen hanging her paintings at the Parson’s
Gallery, London in 1954. The picture she is holding is The Man with the
Book, 1953, (a portrait of Angus Neil) and to the right is A Glasgow Boy.
Joan Eardley’s depiction of the children who
came in and out of her Townhead studio is
controversial. To some tastes these paintings and
drawings are overly sentimental. Others strongly
refute this idea, which contains the accusation
that the work lacks truth; in reality she was an
artist anthropologist, living within a community,
neither sentimentalizing nor disguising the
poverty, recording a world where the adults were
inside or in the pub and the children were the
street life as they cannot be today. The trousers
tied up with a cord is an observation not a motif
just as the chalked walls and boarded up windows
were the precursor to the slum clearance that
would follow.
15 A Glasgow Boy, c.1953
oil on canvas, 45.75 x 30.5 cms
signed lower right
iilustrated
The same boy is painted as Andrew, Joan
Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream
Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 1988,
p55
exhibited
Six Young Painters, Parson’s Gallery, London,
1954; Joan Eardley Exhibition, London Arts
Council, Hayward Gallery, 1988-89, (Cat. 59)
provenance
Jas. McClure, Glasgow; Ms Judith Paris;
Private Collection, Toronto
38

16 Tenement, c.1950
chalk on paper collage, 23 x 16.5 cms
exhibited
Joan Eardley, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, March 1985
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 400); Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow
40

Joan sketching on the street, Townhead.
Photograph by Audrey Walker
Eardley’s powerful drawings and paintings of the urban
dereliction of Glasgow in the 1950’s are poignant depictions of the
character of place, indivisible from the character of its people.
41

Children in Joan’s studio. Photograph by Audrey Walker
17 Boy in Overcoat, c.1956
pastel, 49 x 35 cms
exhibited
Joan Eardley Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1984, (Cat. 13)
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 684)
“They hardly notice me when they come in, they are full of what they have been doing. Who has
gone to jail, who has broken into what shop, who flung a pie into whose face, and so it goes… they
are letting out their life.
“I try to think only in painterly terms – bits of red – all funny bits of colours. For me they are
Glasgow. This sort of richness that I know that Glasgow has, that I hope it always will have.”
BBC recorded interview 1963, Joan Eardley speaking in reference to the Samson family,
12 brothers and sisters that Joan got to know well and regularly drew and painted.
43

“Joan Eardley bent the whole idea of portraiture
to her own highly original ends by drawing and
painting extraordinary character studies of very
ordinary children.”
Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund
Humphries (London), 2013, p130
18 Boy with the Apple Cheeks, c.1959
oil on board, 38.5 x 27.5 cms
provenance
In the artist’s studio inventory this painting is titled Boy with Brown Hair and Grey Jacket
(EE 347); Roland, Browse and Delbanco (bears fragmentary label); Lord Eccles; Fine Art
Society, 1983
exhibited
Joan Eardley Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1984, (Cat. 1)
44

Drawn, quite typically, on three overlapping
sheets the subject of Old Fence is likely to be
down by the canal at Maryhill. Eardley liked
the medium of pastel for its immediacy. Varying
pressure could make it the most forceful or
delicate of mediums.
46

19 Old Fence, c.1950
pastel on paper, 9.5 x 22 cms
exhibited
Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1966, (Cat. 20)
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 518)
47

Child portraiture has always engaged us from Velasquez’ Infanta to Manet,
Bastien-Lepage, our own Glasgow Boys and Eardley herself. The child
image contains the innocence we will all lose so carries a poignancy and
relevance across the years.
Head of a Boy is framed in a simple home-made frame. Joan Eardley
learned joinery during the War and worked with local building firm who
made landing craft (Joan was also tasked with painting the camouflage).
Her basic joinery skills enabled her to knock together her own frames,
although she wrote of her ambition to see her seascapes in handsome
Italian mouldings. So much of her work displays a sense of immediacy often
apparent in the necessity of what she works on; paper is seldom without
a crease or crumple. Boards might have nail holes in the corners and at
least once she used a canvas mail sack tacked over a simple stretcher for
her support. Her medium is not experimental: oil and pastel, are the most
permanent vehicles for pigment.
48

20 Head of a Boy, c.1955
oil on panel, 27 x 17 cms
signed lower left
49

50
Young girl on street biting her finger.
Photograph by Joan Eardley. Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art Archive, Edinburgh

21 Girl in Striped Jumper, c.1959
coloured chalk on paper, 15.25 x 11.5 cms
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 613); The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Private Collection,
Toronto
51

22 Boy with a Fawn Jacket, c.1955-58
pastel, 19 x 21 cms
signed lower left and signed & titled on label verso
illustrated
Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries (London), 2013, p44
“Both she and [Chaim] Soutine painted children without flattery or prettiness yet with a kind of
brutal but sympathetic integrity.”
Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries (London), 2013, p43
53

23 Pink Jumper, c.1959
pastel, 27.5 x 22 cms
illustrated
Front cover, Portrait of a Gallery, The Scottish Gallery, 2010
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 851)
54

Glasgow girl. Photograph by Joan Eardley
This work has the humour and empathy of her
best child paintings; it has a naturalism which
flows from the deep affection and a realism
not born of slavish accuracy but rather coming
from an understanding of the essence of the
child; feral, ragged but vitally alive. The free
drawing, pentimenti, distortion and non-natural
colour take risks, are intuitive but are a wholly
successful route to the realisation of the image.
Pink Jumper can be seen in Joan Eardley’s
studio (see page 37) top right.
55

The Jumper, stiff with dust, is not a snug fit and
the boy’s face is red-raw with cold or hot with
emotion already passed; neither the eyes nor the
ears are a match and the lips are parted: telling
the strange artist lady some banality of a five year
old’s life. These drawings are unique in British
painting at once universal and a precise record of
a tribe in a place now gone.
56

24 The Pale Blue Jersey, c.1960
pastel on glass paper, 26 x 23 cms
exhibited
Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964 (Cat. 74)
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 5)
57

Three children seated in a doorway. Photograph by Joan Eardley
Eardley worked in pastel by preference on fine
glass paper which took the pastel beautifully and
lent a slight sparkle to the sheet. This bravura
drawing, the subject almost certainly Anne
Samson, has all the best attributes of Eardley’s
drawing; strong, well-chosen colour and
unhesitating mark-making; spontaneous drawing
matching the vitality of the child subject.
58

25 The Striped Cardigan, 1962
pastel on glass paper, 26 x 24 cms
signed and dated lower right
exhibited
Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964 (Cat. 99)
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 30); Private Collection
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“Photographs of babies were commonplace, and part of their appeal from
the parents’ point of view was to see how different their sleeping babies
were from other people’s sleeping babies. Joan’s were without doubt
particular babies – yet she turns them into images of power rather than
sentiment. As well as being nascent individuals, they are types of infants in
‘the land of nod’.”
Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries (London), 2013,
p123
Sisters were often left in charge of a baby and in turn would leave him
asleep in Joan’s studio; at least a sleeping child would be still for a while.
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26 Sleeping Child, 1962
pastel on glass paper, 22 x 27 cms
signed and dated on verso
61

62
Joan working in her studio. Photograph by Audrey Walker

27 Child Study, c.1961
mixed media on paper, 22 x 20 cms
signed lower right
63

Girl seated on wooden bench holding female
toddler on lap. Photograph by Joan Eardley.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Archive,
Edinburgh
28 Big Sister, c.1959
pastel on glass paper, 30.5 x 25.9 cms
exhibited
20th Century Scottish Paintings & Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1976; Joan Eardley
Retrospective Exhibition, Talbot Rice Gallery, 1988, (Cat. 84)
provenance
Artist’s Estate; The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Private Collection, Leicestershire; Duncan
Miller Fine Art, London; Private Collection, Toronto
“They usually come up to me and say ‘Will you paint me?’ In fact I am always having knocks on
the door and this question. Some of them I don’t feel particularly interested in and so I just send
them away, but the ones that I want to paint, I try to get to sit still, so mostly I just watch them
moving about and do the best I can.”
Joan Eardley
64

Children playing in the street.
Photograph by Joan Eardley
Joan’s studio was on the first floor and the perspective of The Pedlar’s Stand makes it seem likely to be
a view down on the street as kids and mums gather around the mobile pedlar’s stand, perhaps selling
clothes pegs or grinding knives.
66

29 The Pedlar’s Stand, c.1959
mixed media on paper, 16 x 11 cms
exhibited
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, June 1988 (Cat.34)
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 353)
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This stunning painting is one of the artist’s most ambitious and successful works on paper. It is
painted on good quality watercolour paper which has been laid onto mounting board so that a strip
along the bottom, painted a warm blue and bearing the signature, adds visual relief to the richly
worked subject. Two groups of children, those on the right much more defined, stand in front of a
tenement window, emanating a blue light; there is a pause in a game, a skipping rope is slack between
the groups. To the right by a dark window a simple graffito of a child skipping is chalked on the wall.
The need to draw what was relevant and true in 1960s Glasgow was important for Joan, as it was for
the cave painters of Lascaux in pre-history, where she visited in 1951.
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30 Children and Chalked Wall, c.1962
mixed media on paper, 36 x 56 cms
signed lower right
“The character of Glasgow lies in its back streets which are for me pictorially exciting. There is no
social or political impetus behind my paintings of that part of Glasgow, as is sometimes suggested.
The back streets mean almost entirely screaming, playing children – all over the streets – and
only in the shadows of the doorways groups of women, and at street corners groups of men, but
always chiefly children and the noise of children.”
Joan Eardley
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Glasgow street with graffiti, door on left and boarded up window on right.
Photograph by Audrey Walker. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Archive, Edinburgh
“In a late series of children seen against the graffiti-laden wall of the metal
store below her studio in Townhead, Joan made free use of collage and
stencilled words and newsprint. Graffiti, far from annoying her, offered a
new means of enlivening her paintings of the street kids.”
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing Company
(Edinburgh) Ltd, 1988, p77
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31 Glasgow Children Drawing with Chalk on a Pavement, c.1962
gouache on paper, 15.25 x 20.25 cms
provenance
The artist’s studio inventory (ED 956); Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow; Private Collection,
Toronto
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SELECTED BIOGRAPHY
Born in Sussex in 1921 and moved with the family to London in 1926.
1938 Entered Goldsmith’s College of Art, London
1939 Moved with mother and grandmother to Bearsden, Glasgow
1940 Enrolled at Glasgow School of Art
1942 First stay at Corrie on Arran
1943 Diploma in Drawing and Painting, Glasgow School of Art
Sir James Guthrie Prize for portraiture
Enlisted as a boat-builder’s labourer until the end of the war
1946 Lived for a time in London
Studied for 6 month’s under James Cowie at Hospitalfield, Arbroath
1947–8 Elected professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists
Awarded post–Diploma from Glasgow with travelling scholarship
Carnegie Bursary, RSA students’ exhibition
1948–9 Travelling in Italy and France
1949 Working in Cochrane Street studio, in Glasgow.
Travelling scholarship work shown at Glasgow School of Art
1950 Painting in Port Glasgow
1951 Summer in France
1952 Moved to Townhead studio, Glasgow
1952 First work in Catterline where she later bought property
1955 Elected Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy
First visit to Caverslee, near Selkirk
1956 Increasingly working at Catterline
1959 Visited and worked in Comrie, Perthshire
1960 Guest tutor at Hospitalfield
1962 First signs of serious illness
1963 Elected Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy
16th August died at Killearn Hospital
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
1949 Glasgow School of Art (Travelling Scholarship work)
1950 Solo Exhibition, Gaumont Gallery, Aberdeen
1952 Eight Young Contemporary British Painters, Arts Council (Scottish Committee) Touring
exhibition.
1954 Six Young Painters, Parson’s Gallery, London (organised by Col. Robert Henriques and
David Cleghorn Thomson)
1955 Aspects of Contemporary Scottish Painting, South London Art Gallery
Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery (with Brenda Mark, Robert Henderson
Blyth, William Burns, David Donaldson and Robin Philipson)
First solo London Show at St. George’s Gallery
72

1958 Two–person show with William Gillies during the Edinburgh Festival, The Scottish Gallery
1959 Solo Exhibition, Edinburgh Festival, 57 Gallery, Edinburgh
1960 Contemporary British Landscape, Arts Council of Great Britain, Touring exhibition (into
1961)
1961 Solo Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
1963 Solo Exhibition, Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London
14 Scottish Painters, Commonwealth Institute, London
Four Scottish Painters, Edinburgh Festival, The Arts Council Scottish Committee
SELECTED POSTHUMOUS EXHIBITIONS
1964 Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Scottish Arts Council Memorial Exhibition, Kelvingrove Art
Gallery and Museum, Glasgow then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and subsequent
tour of shortened version
1964 Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Edinburgh Festival Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish
Gallery
(subsequent posthumous solo exhibitions of work by Joan Eardley have been held by
The Scottish Gallery in 1981, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1996 and 2007)
1965 Paintings by Joan Eardley, Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London
1975 Joan Eardley, a Scottish Arts Council Exhibition at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
1985 Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow
1988 Joan Eardley RSA, Retrospective Exhibition concurrently at the Talbot Rice Gallery and
the Royal Scottish Academy during the Edinburgh Festival. Subsequently shown at the
Hayward Gallery, London
1992 Joan Eardley, Paintings, Pastels and Drawings, Mercury Gallery, London ( jointly with
Ewan Mundy, Glasgow and The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
2007 Joan Eardley, The Scottish Gallery
2007–8 Joan Eardley, Retrospective Exhibition, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
2013 Joan Eardley, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and Portland Gallery, London
FILM
Joan Eardley was featured in a 22 minute colour film Three Scottish Painters produced by Templar
film studios, Glasgow for the Scottish Committee of the Arts Council in conjunction with Films of
Scotland, 1964
RADIO
Street Kids and Stormy Skies
Compiled and produced by Vivien Devlin. First broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland 18 August 1983, to
commemorate 20th anniversary of Eardley’s death
Joan Eardley
Presented and produced by Vivien Devlin for broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland 29 March 1988.
Review of 25th anniversary exhibitions planned for 1988
73

JOAN EARDLEY
by Christopher Andreae
Published by Lund Humphries, April 2013
Price: £40
Saturday 6th April 2013, The Scottish Gallery
Talk by Christopher Andreae
11–12 noon: Spaces limited, please RSVP mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
Book signing between 12–2pm
Tuesday 30th April 2013, Portland Gallery
Talk by Christopher Andreae
6–8 pm: Spaces limited, please RSVP art@portlandgallery.com
A book signing will follow the talk
In this new book about Joan Eardley published in the 50th anniversary of
her death, Christpher Andreae provides a fresh assessment of her work and
its relative Scottishness or universality. He relates her art to the work of
contemporaries such as Josef Herman, to inspired teachers such as Hugh
Adam Crawford, and considers the impact of Renaissance art, of 20th
century European expressionism and modern American art. The author
also looks at her relationships, quotes from letters previously embargoed,
and discusses published and unpublished assessments of her work both
during her life and after.
The Author: Christopher Andreae has written about art since the 1960’s.
He is the author of Mary Newcomb (1996 and 2007), A Word or Two
(a collection of essays published in 2004), Mary Fedden: Enigmas and
Variations (2007) and Winifred Nicholson (2009).
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Published by The Scottish Gallery and
Portland Gallery to coincide with the exhibition
joan eardley
Edinburgh
London
3 – 27 April 2013 1 – 17 May 2013
Exhibition can be viewed online at
www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/joaneardley
www.portlandgallery.com
ISBN: 978-1-905146-76-5
Designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk
Photography by William Van Esland
Printed by Barr Printers
All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be
reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any
other means, without the permission of the copyright
holders and of the publishers.
Right: Portrait of Joan Eardley wearing woollen hat.
Photograph by Audrey Walker. Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art Archive, Edinburgh
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ
Tel 0131 558 1200 Email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk
www.scottish-gallery.co.uk
8 Bennet Street, London SW1A 1RP
Tel 020 7493 1888 Email art@portlandgallery.com
www.portlandgallery.com
76