Eardley at the Glasgow School of Art

Unexpected Eardley Alice Strang

The celebrations of Joan Eardley’s centenary have prompted people to wonder where they can see her work: the answer is in unexpected places, from a grammar school to a former abbey

As revealed by a search of the Art UK website, works by Joan Eardley can be found in 36 public collections across the United Kingdom. These works and their acquisition stories have been highlighted in a new Art UK curation, ‘From the Highlands to Hampshire: Collecting Joan Eardley’, pulled together by the 36 curators responsible for them and in a specially devised map (though it’s worth checking before arrival that your local Eardley is on display). Many of her works on paper are also in the public realm, but are not yet all on Art UK. As a result of this project, it was revealed that Eardley’s ‘Little Girl with a Piece’ (1959) is hanging in Campbeltown Grammar School on the Kintyre Peninsula. It is part of the Argyll Collection, formed between 1960 and 1990 and consisting of 173 works of art. It was established by the author and activist Naomi Mitchison and the art adviser Jim Tyre so young people in Argyll and Bute could experience fine art at first hand, in an area with few museums and galleries. ‘Little Girl with a Piece’ is a good example of the work which Eardley made in the Townhead district of Glasgow, where she had a studio from 1952. She was drawn to the vibrancy of the area and its close-knit community and was a regular sight sketching street scenes. The antics of the local children, as they played, squabbled and otherwise passed the time were captured in images executed at speed, some of which were later realised in more fully worked paintings. In this image, a girl is seen absorbed in reading a comic, while holding a ‘piece’ – or sandwich – in her hand. It was acquired for the Argyll Collection in 1964, the year after Eardley’s death.

Regional collections where Eardley is represented include those in Coventry, Kettering, Reading and Rugby. Huddersfield Art Gallery, part of Kirklees Museums & Galleries, is home to her ‘Children and Chalked Wall No. 4’ (c.1963). It comes from a celebrated series of paintings in which pairs of children are shown in front of a graffitied wall below the artist’s Townhead studio. The sitters’ comfortable familiarity is clear in their informal pose, while Eardley’s collaging of newsprint onto her board support reflects the freedom of expression and technique of the original graffiti. Huddersfield’s acquisition was made by Philip James of the Arts Council and Museums Association, from Eardley’s last life-time solo exhibition, held at Roland, Browse & Delbanco in London in 1963. He wrote: ‘I have today bought a picture . . . by Joan Eardley. Although the show is only a week old, practically everything has gone – purchases made by the Arts Council, Contemporary Art Society, Birmingham, Nat. Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Kendal, Abbot Hall. I have bought no. 13 in the catalogue. The price was 175 guineas and have got it for 150.’ Meanwhile, in Trinity College at Oxford University, Eardley’s ‘Townhead Close’ (c.1955) can be found hanging in a tutor’s room. It was purchased by a group of students who formed a subscription art collective in order to purchase modern paintings and prints; acquisitions were duly swapped between their rooms each term. This work was purchased for £26 from St George’s Gallery, London, in 1955, who that year mounted Eardley’s first solo exhibition in the capital. A cluster of young children are depicted within and beside a ‘close’ entrance, the entry to a tenement

‘She was drawn to the vibrancy of the area and its close-knit community and was a regular sight sketching street scenes’

stairwell. The tilt of the doorframe and the swell of the pavement kerb provide a sense of rhythm to the children’s activities, as they observe and participate in street games. Highlights of red bring attention to bricks and other features of the dilapidated setting, as well as to the structural forms of the children themselves. The Scottish north-east coast has been transported to the National Trust property of Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire via Eardley’s ‘Catterline in Winter’, painted in the early 1960s. It is a stark image of the South Row cottages in Catterline, a fishing village just over 20 miles south of Aberdeen. Eardley first visited it in 1951 and in 1954 rented number 1, the most southerly of the homes in this row, seen on the far left of the image. On the righthand side, the gable-end of number 12 is visible. The modest houses are dwarfed by their natural surroundings, as two people toil along the path which bisects the bleak landscape. A hint of sunshine at the lower right combines with the luminous blue of the otherwise glowering sky, to relieve the bleakness of this winter scene. ‘Catterline in Winter’ is one of three works by Eardley which the artist Derek Hill presented to the National Trust in 1996. This was due to his friendship with Mottisfont’s former owner, the art patron Maud Russell, and to his admiration for Eardley herself. He bought this painting from the Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, in 1964, following its inclusion in the memorial exhibition of her work mounted by the Arts Council Scottish Committee that year. The Fleming Collection acquired the first of its five works by Eardley in 1968, to hang in the offices of the Robert Fleming & Co bank, in recognition of its founder’s Scottish roots. In 1970, ‘Field of Barley by the Sea’, another early 1960s painting, joined its holdings. In this work, Eardley revels in the fecundity of the coastal fields farmed around Catterline. Painted en plein air on a board measuring 107 x 110cm, Eardley uses a range of techniques and perspectives to convey the richness of sensual stimulation provided by her environment. The collection is now owned by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation and the Eardleys are regularly on loan and displayed around the country.

Alice Strang is a curator and art historian whose curation of From the Highlands to Hampshire: Collecting Joan Eardley can be viewed at artuk.org/discover/curations/ from-the-highlands-to-hampshirecollecting-joan-eardley

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1 Joan Eardley, Little Girl With A Piece, 1959. (Currently exhibited in Campbeltown Grammar School). Photo: Argyll and Bute Council

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Joan Eardley, Townhead Close, c1955, (previously known as Girls by the Door, the Gorbals, Glasgow.) Photo: The President and Fellows of Trinity College Oxford.

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Joan Eardley, Catterline in Winter, c. 1960- 1963. From the Derek Hill Collection, Mottisfont. Courtesy of The National Trust.

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Joan Eardley, Winter Sea III, 1959. The Fleming Collection. © Joan Eardley Estate

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Joan Eardley, Children and Chalked Wall No. 4, c. 1963. Courtesy of Kirklees Collection: Huddersfield Art Gallery All images © Joan Eardley Estate.

EARDLEY’S

PLAYPEN

Taking a playpen painted by Joan Eardley in Paisley Museum’s collection as a starting point, Victoria Irvine and Catriona McAra explore the artist’s often overlooked personal projects and their influences, offering us new insights and understanding into Eardley’s wider practice

CATRIONA MCARA (CM):

VI:

CM:

Paisley Museum houses a playpen decorated by Joan Eardley in the late 1940s. We know of one other playpen and both were painted for family or friends. These objects have been excluded from Eardley’s output, yet I feel that outright dismissal precludes wider conversations about her interest in childhood culture and these personal projects. This playpen is fascinating and surely provides crucial insights into understandings of Eardley’s broader world view. The high art/low art dichotomy was still very prevalent when this was made but that was all about to change. Art historical thinking on craft has been revised significantly since then, and maybe we need to further revise considerations of Eardley’s output using contemporary feminist language.

Feminist readings of Eardley’s contemporary reviews indicate the gendered language she was subject to, admired for her ‘virility’ and mastery of paint. This language in part accorded Eardley status because it united, to paraphrase feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, creativity with stereotypically masculine qualities. I am intrigued by your idea that we can use contemporary feminist language to provide a more nuanced reading of her work as it relates to childhood. How might we begin that discussion?

I am interested in art by women in the immediate post-war era and how they might provide a model for a work/life balance. The English artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) made a series of night nursery paintings in Mexico City, and even collaborated on a boat-shaped cradle with José Horna in 1949. The boat, for them, was symbolic of wartime exile, and is painted with moons and creatures that likely owe their allegiance to the picture-book illustrations of Carrington’s own childhood Edwardian nursery, e.g. Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter. Did Eardley have an interest in this so-called ‘golden age’ of picturebooks or even a collection of her own?

CM:

VI:

I’m glad you raised the post-war environment when materials were scarce and imagery had newfound significance. Eardley read 1920s editions of Beatrix Potter, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and so forth. Eardley’s niece, Anne Morrison-Hudson, also read the same copies as a child and we can clearly see that Eardley was inspired by Beatrix Potter’s illustrations for the Eardley family playpen (in the form of Tabitha Twitchit and Jemima PuddleDuck). Prior to painting both playpens we know that Eardley made and illustrated a book of nursery rhymes in 1940, exhibited at the Glasgow School of Art Club Show when she was a student there. Do the moons and creatures of Carrington’s cradle further symbolise an escape signified by childhood? Carrington’s nocturnal creatures and moons could be said to relate to the tradition of the night nursery and soothing post-war lullabies like Margaret Wise Brown’s ‘Goodnight Moon’ (1947). Meanwhile, Walt Disney signified that story-time was about to begin with a big, heavy, giltedged tome being opened in feature length animations. Carrington also had a reproduction of Margaret Winifred Tarrant’s The Gates of Fairyland (c.1922) where the children serve as the link between reality and the enchanted characters of storyland. I’m curious that the illustrators Carrington and Eardley relate to should be mostly women. Tell me more about Eardley’s illustrated book, what nursery rhymes did it contain? Are book and playpen one-off projects or did she do further commissions like this alongside her painting practice? This tantalising reference to Eardley’s illustrated book came from a fellow student, Christine Shaw and unfortunately the book is now lost so we are only able to speculate as to its contents. As far as the Eardley family are aware, the book and playpens were one-off projects although childhood – in some form – featured in Eardley’s early work. As for wider cultural context, Fiona Pearson’s work on Eardley has already identified that the artist

CM:

VI:

1 Joan Eardley, Playpen, Paisley Museum and Art Gallery, held by Renfrewshire Leisure on behalf of Renfrewshire Council. Photography Elaine Livingstone.

2 Leonora Carrington and José Horna, La Cuna (The Cradle), 1949. © Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021

3 Joan Eardley, Boy on Stool, Paisley Museum and Art Gallery, held by Renfrewshire Leisure on behalf of Renfrewshire Council. Photography Iona Shepherd. © Joan Eardley Estate

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was painting in the era of Iona and Peter Opie who studied children’s folklore (the recording of nursery stories and children’s street games). Eardley also read the Picture Post which has been cited as significant in terms of its 1948 article ‘The Forgotten Gorbals’ which featured photographs of children by Bert Hardy (1913–1995) and Bill Brandt (1904–1983). How interesting that Eardley worked from such diverse sources, from picture-book illustration to documentary photography, yet both with a focus on childhood subjects and perspectives. This seems singly unique in mid-20th century painting. Does her use of such photographic subjects in her painting shed further light on her nascent feminism and/or feminist readings of her work? Eardley’s association with photography is well-documented and her understanding of Glasgow as a place were people and city were wholly connected relies partly on the heritage of documentary photography. Eardley carried a camera with her from 1953 and used documentary images of graffiti, child’s clothes, etc, as more than an aide-memoire. Eardley’s contempoary, the artist and critic Cordelia Oliver refers to Eardley’s sketches and photographs as a kind of visual feeding, which I like. The language around photography and Eardley has not been examined in terms of feminism which is surprising given contemporary feminist practitioners in the field. Something which interests me: Sara Stevenson referred to the juxtaposition of realism and surreality in Eardley’s photographs (photographic distortion of a real person for example). This dichotomy seems present in Eardley’s work in general; social realism and abstract expressionism, and chimes with this conversation in terms of reality and storybook illustrations. She was obviously highly sensitive and alert to the cultural ephemera and social landscape around her, combining these different aspects, almost collage-like, into her innovative painterly practice. So, in sum, what does it mean, I wonder, for a pioneering woman, pursuing an aesthetically advanced creative practice, to work on a craft-based side-project at that historical moment? And finally, can we understand Eardley better through exploring her use of childhood motifs? It means that we should continually remind ourselves to adjust the prism through which we view the work of women artists. The playpens were personal projects, yet this does not mean they are less historically significant than her finest oils. I think you said it earlier – the narrative between domestic and amateur, craft or ‘less than’, has existed since the 19th century and is historically implicit in the work of women artists. Both playpens speak more broadly to Eardley’s visual bank of sources and her interest in children, and as you have demonstrated, show that we can start to contextualise Eardley’s output with nuance rather than thinking of her within traditional art historical canons. What of her women colleagues like Dorothy Steel (1927–2002) and Margot Sandeman (1922–2009)? What of her women peers in the UK and internationally? And which other women were then working on child subjects? More generally I believe that the playpens and references to picture-books reinforce that Eardley was a storyteller above all, as she herself said, ‘the story part of it does matter’.

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Victoria Irvine is curator at Paisley Museum. Catriona McAra is assistant director of heritage collections and curation at St Andrews University

This conversation was first delivered at the Hunterian’s Joan Eardley: The Centenary Celebration event on 18 May 2021