Download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue - The Scottish Gallery

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
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