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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
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