Joan Eardley Centenary | August 2021 | The Scottish Gallery by The Scottish Gallery

1921

CENTENARY 2021

1921

CENTENARY 2021

JOAN EARDLEY

CENTENARY 30 July – 28 August 2021 FOREWORD 5 Anne Morrison-Hudson FESTIVAL EXHIBITION, 1964 6 Cordelia Oliver WHERE GREATNESS SPRINGS Guy Peploe

LIST OF PLATES

JULY FIELDS CENTENARY TAPESTRY 2021 Naomi Robertson

TOWNHEAD 28 EARDLEY’S GLASGOW Lachlan Goudie

CATTERLINE 88 CATTERLINE IN CONTEXT Professor John Morrison

BIOGRAPHY 138

Joan Eardley in her Townhead studio, c.1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Foreword

his centenary year is evolving into a wonderful celebration of Joan Eardley’s artistic legacy, with events happening across Scotland. These have been challenging times to plan such an ambitious exhibition, but as usual The Scottish Gallery has risen to the task. The long and productive association between the artist, family and gallery remain as important as ever in maintaining and promoting the name of Joan Eardley here in Scotland and further afield. Looking back to the beginnings, 1955 was a life changing year in Joan’s career. The early 50s had seen her star in ascendance with her significance as a young artist of note being recognised by inclusion of works in a number of prestigious travelling and mixed shows across Britain. She held her first solo exhibition in London, and more significantly for Scotland she was awarded associate membership at the RSA, which coincided with Scottish Gallery senior partner Bill Macaulay inviting Joan to exhibit paintings alongside best-known artists of the day in The Scottish Gallery’s 1955 Festival Exhibition. Following this came Joan’s first solo show with The Gallery in 1961 and the significance cannot be underestimated. A large number of works

were purchased including important paintings for the collections of Kelvingrove in Glasgow and The Arts Council of Great Britain. At the time of Joan’s death at the age of fortytwo, she was on the brink of being established as an influential artist within Britain and was about to step into the international art world with a planned show in New York. Since then, however, her name and huge talent has largely been forgotten except here in Scotland. Many finished works and a huge volume of working drawings and sketches that were the backbone to her paintings remained in her studios in both Glasgow and Catterline at her death. Over the intervening years, The Scottish Gallery have been instrumental in continuing to promote and sell her work in various mixed and solo shows, culminating today in marking the centenary of her birth with this exhibition. Happy Birthday Aunty Joan and thank you Scottish Gallery. ANNE MORRISON-HUDSON

Niece of Joan Eardley

Joan Eardley painting in Catterline, 1961. Photograph by Audrey Walker

The Scottish Gallery Festival Exhibition, 1964

good deal has been written about Joan Eardley since that black Friday, a year ago almost to the day, when the news of her death saddened a far wider circle than merely that of her friends and acquaintances. For, in the fifteen years or so since her work began to attract interest and admiration, Joan Eardley had managed to become a very real presence, through her paintings, for many, many people. By involving herself totally – her whole aesthetic integrity as well as her physical being – honestly and unashamedly in experience which, through her work, she could so magnificently share, she managed to touch a far wider range of people than is the case with most painters. As with, for example, Van Gogh and Turner, the excitement of immediate recognition is part of the Eardley magic, similar, if not precisely alike for those with cultivated, and those with untutored sensibilities. Although by birth and early upbringing she belongs to the south of England, her whole adult life was spent in Scotland. Indeed, she identified herself far more closely than most native Scots with two of the powerful and genuine springs of Scottish life – the teeming, back street, urchin life of Glasgow, and the bleak, wild richness of the north-east sea coast which snared her in the early 50s and where she lived more and more for the rest of her life. At the beginning of the war she came with her family to live in Glasgow, studied there at the Glasgow School of Art, and afterwards found her first obsessive subject almost on her doorstep. The

tall tenements, their lower storeys rich with a patina of once-bright peeling paintwork, and a remarkable sgraffito-like wealth of chalkings, are familiar in her later, well-known Glasgow paintings, but the fascination of the old, strangely colourful tumbledown stone buildings began, for her in student days. Her Rottenrow studio was right in the middle of it all, her models swarming round her, playing their shrieking games, giggling together in the ‘closes’, hunched, knees to chin, on the kerbstones on summer days, or ‘sitting’ for a brief halfhour in her studio. And how does one describe the language she invented to transmit her experiences of the Kincardineshire seashore; the means by which, especially the later Catterline paintings, she could give a sense of the feel and smell and sound of the sea with its great, phosphorescent bursts of breaking foam against a leaden sky, or the warm, humming green air above fecund summer fields. Those tiny moments, too, of complete recognition: the way a bar of watery gold sunlight shatters the sea’s surface, or fuses with spume in mid-air; or the menacing stillness of the air before a storm – the very timelessness, both of the experience and of the manner of its expression, is enough, surely, to secure Joan Eardley’s future reputation. CORDELIA OLIVER

Extract from Joan Eardley, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964

Joan Eardley in her Townhead studio, c.1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Where Greatness Springs

t is impossible to predict from where greatness springs. If you go looking for it, you will not find it. Equally the idea of the undiscovered genius is romantically attractive, but it is a narrative which insists on a moment of discovery, on a revelation. Joan Eardley was perhaps the most unpromising subject for greatness. She was intensely shy, a woman in a male dominated crucible, disinterested in the politics of art or its public relations, with little interest in how she appeared to others. Yet she was championed by her tutors at The Glasgow School of Art, taken up by the leading galleries in Edinburgh and London and lauded by the curators and critics whose choices and columns mattered most. Because she was a great artist all could be forgiven, and in being the extraordinary woman who made those paintings, whose quick sketches carry the conviction of genius, she broke a mould and has been taken to the hearts of all who have come to know her. Eardley was born in 1921, on a dairy farm run by her father in Sussex. When she was five she left with her mother and sister, to Blackheath in London, to her grandmother’s house. The farm was sold and her father, who had been damaged in the Great War, committed suicide three years later in 1929. With the outbreak of WWII the family moved again, to Scotland, and settled in Bearsden by January 1940. From here she commuted into the city and attended the Glasgow School of Art.

Opposite: Joan Eardley in Catterline, c.1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker Right: Joan Eardley in her Catterline cottage, c.1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

For a decade, the institution provided her creative locus: her Diploma, evening classes, post-Dip placement and a travelling scholarship, to France and Italy in 1949. She might have moved south, and Glasgow’s art scene was by no means an easy, nurturing environment for a young, gay woman artist, but there was something about the place and its people which inspired her and made her feel at home. While living with her mother and sister, she rented an attic studio at 21 Cochrane Street, which ran along the side of the City Chambers. These streets of tenements would be demolished by the mid-60s, but despite the poverty in Eardley’s time, a vital community persisted. She was attracted by the margins, the back greens, graffitied walls, a gypsy camp at Bearsden or kids, cranes and bomb rubble at Clydebank. In Europe it was the same: peasants working, beggars by St Marks Square, rundown streets in Paris and Florence, never the grand vistas of canal and boulevard. In Townhead she got to know the local children; best known were the numerous Samson family, Anne with her squint and red hair, brown haired Pat a year older. In cat. 25 a wee lad in a red jumper sits lost in thought for a moment, but the artist must be quick, a shout from the street and the studio will empty pell-mell. A bag of sweets or a poke of chips (see cat. 7) might be offered for a longer sitting, but Eardley would draw quickly, opportunistically, and continuously to capture the shifting fizzing essence

of the kids. She also used her camera to record details – graffiti, the coal-cart and corner shop, children playing with skipping ropes, prams and trikes. Others: Oscar Marzaroli and her friend Audrey Walker took photographs of the studio and artist as well as the street, all participant observers of a world that was about to be swept away to satisfy the planners’ road map and social experiments. In 1951, she held her first ambitious solo exhibition in the Gaumont Cinema in Aberdeen, but was so ill with mumps that her friend Annette Soper took her to Catterline, south of Stonehaven, to stay at the Creel Inn and convalesce. The next year, Annette married a local fisherman and they suggested Joan used the Watch House as a studio; from then she always had a place in the village. Accolades, exhibitions and

honours followed, including most significantly her Festival Exhibition with The Scottish Gallery in 1955. Bill Macaulay, the urbane senior partner was always kind and professional, recognising both the artist’s genius and intense shyness. However he could not resist asking her to make a painting of his own brood of five, wild children (cat. 1) and the result is an extraordinary work, with five individual portraits presented as one. Perhaps neither sitters nor artist relished the sacrifice of time, but Joan took great care, making many preparatory drawings, and the result is as unflinching and unsentimental as it is concentrated. In the 50s, Eardley added subjects – she visited Audrey Walker’s home at Caverslee near Selkirk and painted the larch woods, farm buildings and interiors and came back to draw the summer shearing. In the same year, 1955, she bought no. 1 The Row at

Joan Eardley, Kersland Street, Glasgow, c.1961. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Audrey Walker at no.18, Catterline, 1960. Photograph by Joan Eardley

Joan Eardley in Catterline, c.1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Catterline and began to spend most of her time there. Her diligence at sending work for exhibition and answering requests for work (which artists of the era never refused) led to her election as an associate of the RSA, the rare distinction of full membership coming a few months before her death in 1963. In Catterline in the final years, as Patrick Elliott Senior Curator of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has observed, her vision shifted from the village to the landscape; her great, late subject ranges from the wild winter storm to the thrum of life in the field-edges above the cliff top in summer. Here she drew constantly, leaving over 1000 works on paper in her studio, and for her oils on board she began to press stems and seed heads into the impasto. Her painterly vocabulary is now so advanced that the means she could deploy: collage, palette knife and her own pigments, led to very physical, expressive works. They might be superficially close to tachisme but in reality, speak to the artist’s deep connection to her subject, to its sensual and physical presence bringing her closer to Soutine than de Stael. In the fifty-eight years since her passing, after she succumbed to cancer in August 1963, her reputation has been enhanced and today her value is hugely augmented, and her cultural capital has never been higher. But it has been a slow and quiet progress; she has been a well-kept secret in Scotland largely ignored by the guardians of reputation and valuation whose

eyes seldom turned to the north. This might not have been the case had she lived; between The Scottish Gallery and her London agent, Rowland Browse and Delbanco, she would have continued a stellar exhibiting career which would have taken her to New York. What is certain is that individuals form a very close bond with her work, understanding its urgency and raw honesty and identify with the poignancy of the artist’s short, dedicated life. She is regarded with a fierce loyalty by her converts, and we can recognise today how nothing has dated her, the work is as direct and powerful as it was in the 50s. The artists whose work has a similar effect, the time of its making being irrelevant to its viewing, are some of the most lauded and loved; Rembrandt and Van Gogh head the list, and Joan Eardley is perhaps one of the best British examples, of any time. So, a hundred years since her birth, we can give thanks that her extraordinary body of work is available to us and in a sense helps us to identify our cultural identity. The innocence of childhood, even in adversity, and the destructive and regenerative power of nature were her subjects; community and nature in the raw were her emotional loci, and for us natural places to ponder our own fragile existence. GUY PEPLOE The Scottish Gallery

1921

CENTENARY 2021

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

The Macaulay Children, 1957 Jetty with Crane, c.1950–55 Woman Knitting, c.1948 Old Woman, c.1948 By the Fireside, c.1956 Martin, c.1957 Girl with a Poke of Chips, c.1960–63 Glasgow Corner Shop, c.1955–60 The Striped Cardigan, 1962 Glasgow Tenements, Blue Sky, 1954 The Coal Cart, c.1955–60 Group of Figures, c.1955–60 Tenement, c.1950 Head of a Boy, c.1950–55 The Close Mouth, c.1958 Girl and Chalked Wall, c.1959–62 Red Sandstone Gable End, c.1958–60 Tenement Corner, Townhead, c.1958–60 Tenements in the Snow, 1953 Boy in Brown Jersey, c.1950–55

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Joan Eardley, Catterline, Summer 1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Boy, c.1950–55 Girl in Yellow Holding Baby, c.1959–63 One of the Samsons, c.1955 Boy with Elastic Band, 1962 Boy in Red Jumper, c.1960–62 Ripening Barley, c.1960–62 Hedgerow, c.1961–62 Barley Field, c.1961–62 Storm over the Sea, Catterline, c.1961–63 Beehives, c.1958–62 Corn Stooks, near Catterline, c.1958–62 Tree and Haystacks, Sunset, c.1957–60 Catterline Landcape, 1962 Cottages, Catterline, 1961 Winter Sea, c.1961 Seascape, c.1961 Grey Beach and Sky, 1962 Jar of Summer Flowers, 1962 Sunset Landscape, 1963

[1] The Macaulay Children, 1957 oil on board, 60 x 37.5 cm, 60 x 80 cm, 60 x 37.5 cm (three panels) signed central panel, upper right exhibited Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Scottish Arts Council Memorial Exhibition, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and subsequent tour, 1964, cat. 34 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh

This work, the only known commissioned painting by the artist, has as its subject the five children of William Macaulay and his wife, a daughter of Sir David Russell of Markinch and Iona. Neither the artist nor the children were enthusiastic about the sittings, and its outcome is a tribute to Eardley’s regard for Bill Macaulay, the senior partner of The Scottish Gallery and her gentle guide through the commercial art world. She tried hard and has made a successful work in the end, capturing the children full of mischief and character. A great many preparatory sketches and drawings were required and sometimes appear on the market confused as Townhead street children. From left to right appear Madeleine, Amanda, Andrew, Martin, John.

[2] Jetty with Crane, c.1950–55 pastel on paper, 20.2 x 25.2 cm exhibited Joan Eardley RSA – Paintings & Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2007 provenance The artist’s studio inventory ED580; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

Joan Eardley was introduced to Port Glasgow in 1950 by her friend Dorothy Steel, who was from Gourock. There, Eardley was attracted by the workings of the shipyards and scenes of heavy industry. Port Glasgow was also painted by Stanley Spencer a few years before, who was stationed there as an official war artist.

[3] Woman Knitting, c.1948 chalk on paper, 69 x 52 cm exhibited Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow, 1985; Joan Eardley, Restless Talent, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017, cat. 1 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED236; Carnegie Dunfermline Trust, Dunfermline

Eardley made several visits to Arran with her friend Margot Sandeman and others from the early 40s. The Sandeman family had been coming to the island since Margot was a child and stayed at Corrie. Here, Eardley befriended a woman called Jeannie Kelso and made several drawings and paintings of Jeannie and her cottage interior. Our example is of a type with her Italian drawings made in 1948/49 and French drawings of 1951 of individual peasant figures, working or at rest, and is a poignant image of old age. Jeannie is in her floral house apron and shawl, her swollen fingers at work on her knitting. It is an early example of what will become one of the chief themes of her life; the dignity and character of the human spirit.

[4] Old Woman, c.1948 pastel on paper, 18 x 13 cm exhibited Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1968, cat. 90 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED370; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

[5] By the Fireside, c.1956 oil on canvas, 57 x 77 cm exhibited Modern Masters II, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2014, cat. 8 provenance Private collection

[6] Martin, c.1957 pastel on paper, 17.78 x 15.24 cm exhibited Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Scottish Arts Council Memorial Exhibition, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and subsequent tour, 1964, cat. 53 provenance William J. Macaulay, Edinburgh and thence by descent

This portrait is of Martin Macaulay and is one of several studies of the five children of Bill Macaulay, the senior partner of The Scottish Gallery, painted in 1957. Eardley agreed to paint the Macaulay children and began with individual studies such as this one.

July Fields Centenary Tapestry 2021

ovecot Studios, Edinburgh’s world-renowned tapestry studio, have marked the centenary of Joan Eardley by creating a new tapestry from the painting July Fields, 1959, which is held in the City Art Centre collection in Edinburgh. The tapestry July Fields, 2021, will hang in The Scottish Gallery during the exhibition. Master Weaver Naomi Robertson discusses the challenges of interpreting and making this beautiful new artwork.

I wanted to weave one of Eardley’s landscapes and July Fields, 1959 particularly drew me because of its colour and beautiful painterly marks that I thought would translate well in tapestry. The soft muted colours in the sky contrast with the bold brush strokes in the foreground to create a great balance in the composition and give a lot of opportunity for interesting colour mixing. The biggest challenges have been the intense and constant detail and painterly marks; even the quieter parts of the painting still have a lot going on, scraped paint and layers of colour. It has been hard to edit as each mark seems as important as the next, so to simplify would take away from the character of the piece. The tapestry has taken seven months to weave. I began by weaving a colour strip to gauge the colours and tones. With a painting as detailed as this one it is

impossible to pick every colour at the start, instead I chose a few to set the foundations for the palette. I have chosen to weave the image on its side, which is quite usual in tapestry, but we choose which direction the image sits best on the warps. The first half of the painting is mostly “mid-tones” with little contrast; this is challenging as I have nothing to compare it with. I roll the tapestry down around the bottom roller of the loom as I weave, so I only ever see a section of the tapestry at a time, I have to be confident that each part of the tapestry relates to the next. Because you have to immerse yourself in a tapestry, you become very close to it. I have found this tapestry very intense because of the level of detail, but have loved every minute. There are always milestones to work towards and I get carried along, eager to get on to the next bit, to weave the daisies, the strong bold paint marks, the fence posts, then the rich yellow fields. I have always loved and admired Eardley’s work but weaving one of her paintings has given me a new insight into the complexity and magic of her painting. The bold colour resonates against the soft muted colours in other parts of the painting. NAOMI ROBERTSON

Master Weaver & Tapestry Studio Manager Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh

Above: Details of Joan Eardley tapestry July Fields, 2021, by Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh Left: July Fields, c.1959 (City Art Centre, Museums & Galleries Edinburgh) [copyright courtesy of the artist’s estate]

Townhead

Children on Rottenrow, Townhead, Glasgow. Photograph by Audrey Walker

My Glasgow

In the early 1960s Eardley recorded a taped interview, and spoke of her enthusiasm for the back streets of Glasgow and the children who played there: ‘The community feeling is rapidly disappearing in Glasgow... I do feel that there is still a little bit left. I try still to paint Glasgow so long as there is this family group quality. I’ve known about half a dozen families well I suppose during the period of time I’ve worked in Glasgow... about ten years or more and at the present moment a family by the name of Samson. I have been painting them for seven years... there are a large number of them, twelve, so I’ve always had a certain number of children from this family of any age I choose... some children I don’t like... most of them I get on with... some interest me much more as characters... these ones I encourage – they don’t need much encouragement – they don’t pose – they come up and say “will you paint me?” There are always knocks at the door – the ones I want – I try it get them to stand still – it’s not possible to get a child to stay still... I watch them moving about and do the best I can... the Samsons – they amuse me – they are full of what’s gone today – who’s broken into what shop and who’s flung a pie in whose face – it goes on and on. They just let out all their life and energy... and I just watch them and I do try and think about them in painterly terms... all the bits of red and bits of colour and they wear each other’s clothes – never the same thing twice running... even that doesn’t matter... they are Glasgow – this richness that Glasgow has – I hope it will always have – a living thing, intense quality – you can’t ever know what you are going to do but as long as Glasgow has this I’ll always want to paint. Whenever I come back I get a new feeling – chiefly the back streets – I always feel the same – I want to paint them differently – but the same thing – you can’t stop observing, things are happening all the time – you are recognising them in your mind.’ Joan Eardley by Fiona Pearson, National Galleries of Scotland, 2007, p.31

The demolition of Townhead, c.1963. Photo: www.urbanglasgow.com

As a student at The Glasgow School of Art, Joan was already heading, by her own account, for the slums that were to be the vital subject of her art. In her 1963 interview, she remembered this: ‘Even at the art school I used to wander away from the centre of town usually to the East because that seemed to be the quickest direction that I could reach the sort of back streets. To me, that’s the living part of Glasgow, where the people are. Something that’s real...’ The urban Eardley’s works, with few exceptions, are all about people, mainly children. Even the paintings of looming tenements usually have children in the street or gaping out of windows; the buildings are the setting and backdrop for the lives of the human subjects who were the main preoccupation of the urban Eardley. Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p.66–68

Joan Eardley’s studio in Townhead, Glasgow. Photograph by Jim Cairns

Joan in her Townhead studio, c.1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Left: Joan Eardley’s studio on the corner of St James Road, Townhead, Glasgow. Photograph by Cordelia Oliver Right: Joan Eardley’s studio at 204 St James Road, Townhead, Glasgow. Photograph by Audrey Walker

The Townhead Studio

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. 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 Road in 1952. 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.

Joan’s favourite models in Townhead were the Samson children. In 2010, film-maker John Archer of Hopscotch films interviewed four sisters from this large family and their mother. Watching the film about Joan, they reminisced: ‘...that was a treasure trove in the studio, there was always wee nooks and crannies everywhere to play...’ ‘She’s lovely isn’t she?... She was a lovely, lovely person. She looks as if she’s attacking the paint in this one here...’ ‘A lot of wee sketches up on the wall that she used to give us... and we used to take them home and make airplanes out of them...And my mother would kindle a fire with them.’ ‘She’d sit you down and you used to sit and draw and she’d just sit and sketch you while you were drawing. Because I mean sometimes you were up there for four, five hours... And the chalks... well she used to say they cost a lot of money’... ‘Is that me and you?’ ‘And the one that’s in the art gallery she actually got me to put my initials on at the bottom. MS.’ ‘And it looks quite tiny her studio there but it was massive... Big. It was big... And it was sunny... Remember the single bed she had? ‘She was quite a mannish looking... She was great... She was very, very gentle... very quiet spoken and... She was very nice.’ Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p. 26

In the Studio

Joan and toddler in her Townhead studio, c.1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Children of No Mean City

Miss Eardley runs ahead of the rest. This artist... is interpreting Glasgow to the world with an authenticity not achieved, perhaps, since Muirhead Bone, [who] in his own very manner, brought the shipyards and the city streets alive with line. Her preoccupation is with the seedier streets, the pavements and the tenements, walls frescoed with chalk drawings and soot, and those whose barren playgrounds they provide... the main emphasis is on the children of no mean city. To depict these waifs with their knobbly knees emerging stalk-like from flower-pot wellington boots, their clutched jammy pieces and their obstinately apple cheeks, the insouciant Andrew sublimely unaware that his stomach is showing between shorts and pullover, Miss Eardley commands line with something of the indignant vigour of Van Gogh in the Borinage. Alick Sturrock, Glasgow Herald, 1955. Quoted in Joan Eardley RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing, 1989, p. 53

Eardley’s studio, Townhead, Glasgow. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Eardley’s Glasgow

recently interviewed an artist who had studied alongside Joan Eardley in the 1940s, at The Glasgow School of Art. Joan, I was informed, was in the habit of wearing sandals and would often walk around the corridors of the art school in a manner referred to by her contemporaries as, ‘the come to Jesus walk’. The comment reveals a lot. It acknowledges Joan Eardley’s shy and retiring demeanour as well as the presumptions and quiet judgements that would stick to her throughout her short life. The Scottish art world in the 1950s and 60s was a macho place, dominated by male artists and teachers who confidently advocated a painterly and figurative approach to the canvas. In this context Joan was an outsider. Here was a young artist whose work was unconventional, bold and expressive, a painter who happened to be a woman, whose accent was English and who, whisper it, was gay. Many of these facts helped contribute to a certain anxiety in the way the contemporary Scottish art establishment responded to the young Joan Eardley. Critics often referred to the ‘strength’ or the ‘masculinity’ of her work and she would only ever have one solo exhibition in the city where she lived, Glasgow. But, just like the great waves she often painted in her seascapes, Eardley’s raw talent swept away any prejudice. Her approach to the canvas was so instinctive, so energetic and full of empathy that whether she

was depicting a building, a person or a landscape, it was clear to any observer that here was an artist who painted from the heart. Joan Eardley may indeed have walked through the School of Art of the 1940s wearing Jesus-sandals but in my opinion, she strides across the landscape of 20th century Scottish painting like a colossus. The drawings and paintings featured in this Centenary exhibition focus upon the works Joan produced in and around her Townhead studio, in the East End of Glasgow. These were the streets where a young Charles Rennie Mackintosh had grown up, another artist who didn’t always have an easy relationship with the city with which he is forever associated. And like Mackintosh, Eardley transformed the way that we Glaswegians came to look at our town, its architecture, its community. This is something I came to appreciate from a young age. On childhood visits to Kelvingrove Art Gallery I was always drawn to Joan Eardley’s celebrated painting Two Children. This depiction of a pair of Townhead kids, framed against a striking backdrop of colour and collage, redefined my understanding of what a portrait could look like. In its enthusiastic portrayal of grit and graffiti, the canvas also celebrated elements of Glasgow’s urban fabric which existed on the eye level of a ten-year-old like me, but which the grown-ups often hurried past.

Joan Eardley sketching in Townhead, Glasgow. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Left: In the Townhead studio. Photograph by Audrey Walker Below: David, Brian and Robert Samson. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Andrew Samson, Townhead studio, 30th July, 1957. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Two of the works featured in this exhibition, Girl with a Poke of Chips (cat. 7) and Girl and Chalked Wall (cat. 16), share many of the qualities that first intrigued me about the Kelvingrove portrait. Like all these Glaswegian school children, I knew what it was like to have my picture painted on Saturday mornings, since my dad was the artist and portrait painter Alexander Goudie. His studio may not have been in the East End and I was certainly, by contrast, a child of privilege and private school, but Glasgow doesn’t care much for social niceties. Like the scribbled lines and overflowing colours of Eardley’s magnificent sketches, the city’s character, it’s vibrancy and aggression, it’s extremes of social deprivation and ostentatious wealth, grab you in a city-wide bear hug. Whether you’re from Townhead or Hillhead, you get the picture. Standing in front of Two Children in Kelvingrove, this was a Glasgow I recognised. And here, in these sketches and paintings, it remains – the sooty tenement walls and the echoing close, the steaming diffuser

of vinegar and batter clutched in one hand, a child’s scream, a playground tug on the hair. It takes me back. And that’s the mark of Joan Eardley’s greatness. The images in this exhibition were created 60 or 70 years ago but in the commitment with which she invests every mark, in the bravery of how she chooses to express what she sees, she allows the viewer to stand alongside her in an eternal moment of creative spontaneity. It’s a privilege. Joan Eardley broke with tradition as a painter, she broke with convention as a person and she never compromised her determination to be an honest witness of the world she saw around her. No artist has ever painted Glasgow the way Eardley did. LACHLAN GOUDIE

[7] Girl with a Poke of Chips

It is this subject, the child portrait in front of a graffitied wall, which more than any other has formed the enduring bond between the artist, artwork and individual viewer. Her purpose is as ever to make a successful painting, but in doing so with love, has achieved so much more. Writing recently in Apollo Magazine, Samuel Reilly observed, ‘Looking at Glasgow’s poverty squarely in its face, where in the past so many had contrived to simply look the other way, Eardley sought neither to romanticise nor sensationalise. She was driven in part by formal concerns, “I do try to think about the children in painterly terms as much as any other term – all the bits of red and colour, never the same thing running twice.” Reilly identifies the ‘dignity of autonomy, of individual vision the artist brings to bear on her subject. Here are the contradictions of Glasgow laid bare, with love.’ In this painting the girl savours her poke of chips, warming her hands and taking in the rich sharp aroma. She is posed (or observed?) in front of a wall bearing the scrawl of chalk graffiti without which the picture could have succumbed to its potential sentimentality. Instead it is made real and universal, concentrated in the moment, but captured forever.

[7] Girl with a Poke of Chips, c.1960–63 oil on canvas with newspaper, 68 x 50 cm signed verso exhibited Joan Eardley, Recent Paintings, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London, 1963, cat. 4; Joan Eardley, Memorial Exhibition, The Scottish Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and subsequent tour, 1964; Joan Eardley, Scottish Arts Council Exhibition, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1975, cat. 98 provenance Mrs. I. Eardley, Glasgow

[8] Glasgow Corner Shop, c.1955–60

[8] Glasgow Corner Shop, c.1955–60 pastel on paper, 25.5 x 24.5 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, A Sense of Place, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 12 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED545; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh Photograph by Andy Phillipson/livewireimage.com

[9] The Striped Cardigan, 1962

Children became the main focus of Eardley’s Glasgow work in the mid-1950s, thanks to her rapport with the Samson children. She drew the children in the street and in her studio; they are usually shown isolated, against an indeterminate background, so it is impossible to tell whether they are inside or outside. Some of the pastel drawings were done on sandpaper, in order to catch as much of the rich pigment as possible. It is notable that few of the drawings seem to have been completed with particular paintings in mind. She made thousands of quick sketches outdoors and many resolved pastel drawings of children indoors. Joan Eardley, A Sense of Place, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2016 by Patrick Elliot with Anne Galastro, p. 13

[9] The Striped Cardigan, 1962 pastel on glass paper, 26 x 24 cm signed and dated lower right exhibited Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964, cat. 99; Joan Eardley, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and Portland Gallery, London, 2016, cat. 25 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED30; Private collection

[10] Glasgow Tenements, Blue Sky, 1954 oil on canvas, 81 x 101.5 cm portrait of a sitting boy verso, signed with monogram lower right exhibited Joan Eardley, Scottish Arts Council Exhibition, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1975, cat. 40; Exhibition of Paintings by Joan Eardley, University of Stirling, 1969, cat. 9; Joan Eardley Retrospective Exhibition, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and The Hayward Gallery, London, 1988, cat. 64; Joan Eardley, Restless Talent, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017, cat. 4 provenance The artist’s studio inventory EE6; Mrs I. Eardley; Private collection, Edinburgh illustrated Joan Eardley RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing, 1987, p. 67; Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p. 25

Glasgow Tenements, Blue Sky is a pre-eminent example of Eardley’s early portraits of the City of Glasgow. The block of the tenement sits on a hill (the town is after all sited on an undulating landscape), pulling a little at its neighbour, but as solid as a castle. It is dark, but not menacing and imbued with life: light comes from windows; washing hangs above the sunken courtyard in front; a figure emerges from the doorway with a cart, or pram; the cobalt blue clothing picking up the brilliant sky-colour above. Her mark making is incisive and vigorous, the human history of the buildings; pollution, weathering and repair, recorded honestly and with a deep affection far from social commentary. Another version, in a wider format to include more of the tenements to the right, is in The Saville Club collection and illustrated on p. 171 of Christopher Andreae’s book.

[11] The Coal Cart, c.1955–60 pastel on paper, 10 x 13 cm provenance The artist’s studio inventory ED562; Roland Browse & Delbanco, London; Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

[12] Group of Figures, c.1955–60 pastel on paper, 9 x 12.5 cm provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED315; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

[13] Tenement, c.1950 pastel on three sheets, 23 x 16.5 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1985; Joan Eardley, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and Portland Gallery, London, 2016, cat. 16 provenance The artist’s studio inventory ED400; Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

[14] Head of a Boy, c.1950–55 pastel and watercolour, 25 x 19 cm exhibited Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1958; Joan Eardley RSA – Paintings & Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2007; Joan Eardley, A Sense of Place, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 35 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED659; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

[15] The Close Mouth, c.1958 gouache, 24 x 22 cm signed lower left exhibited Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1958; Joan Eardley RSA – Paintings & Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2007; Joan Eardley, A Sense of Place, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 34 provenance The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

We are looking at a wall, with a door and a window next to it, and a huddle with a child below. But the blue she has chosen and where the three elements of her composition float, is Eardley’s own, not observed (except perhaps in a detail). Her choice to represent the essence of the simple scene shows the warm, optimistic feeling she has about the community of Townhead, the streets she knew so well around her studio.

To Joan Eardley Pale yellow letters humbly straggling across the once brilliant red of a broken shop-face CONFECTIO and a blur of children at their games, passing, gazing as they pass at the blur of sweets in the dingy, cosy Rottenrow window – an Eardley on my wall. Such rags and streaks that master us! – that fix what the pick and bulldozer have crumbled to a dingier dust, the living blur fiercely guarding energy that has vanished, cries filling still the unechoing close! I wandered by the rubble and the house left standing kept a chill, dying life in their islands of stone. no window opened as the coal cart rolled and the coalman’s call fell coldly to the ground. But the shrill children jump on my wall. Edwin Morgan, 1962

[16] Girl and Chalked Wall, c.1959–62

[16] Girl and Chalked Wall, c.1959–62 gouache, 46.5 x 28.5 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, A Sense of Place, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2016, cat. 30 provenance The artist’s studio inventory EE1379; The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Private collection, Edinburgh illustrated Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p. 174

In her later Glasgow paintings, Eardley combines the figure and the city in a new way. The figure of a child is subsumed into the rich texture of graffiti on the wall behind, so that the two have become one, as they were for the artist – place and people forming a community she valued so dearly. She has used a rich cobalt blue pigment which suffuses and unifies. Marks, symbols, graffiti, the simplified human form – all make a near abstract realisation which fully inhabits its inspiration in a way that prefigures Jean-Michel Basquiat by twenty years.

[17] Red Sandstone Gable End, c.1958–60 pastel on paper, 10 x 12.5 cm exhibited Joan Eardley RSA – Paintings & Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2007 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED433; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

[18] Tenement Corner, Townhead, c.1958–60 pastel on paper, 12.5 x 10 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, In Context, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2015, cat. 12; Joan Eardley, Restless Talent, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017, cat. 11 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED400; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

[19] Tenements in the Snow, 1953 oil on board, 23 x 29 cm signed lower left exhibited St George’s Gallery, 1955, cat. 11; Joan Eardley Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1961; Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Scottish Arts Council Memorial Exhibition, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and subsequent tour, 1964, cat. 25; Joan Eardley, Scottish Arts Council Exhibition, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1975, cat. 62; Joan Eardley RSA, Retrospective Exhibition, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 1988 provenance Col. Robert Henriques, MBE, Gloucestershire

[20] Boy in Brown Jersey, c.1950–55 pastel on paper, 16.5 x 11 cm exhibited Christmas Exhibition, Compass Gallery, Glasgow, 1982 provenance Private collection, London

[21] Boy, c.1950–55 pastel on paper, 17 x 10 cm signed lower left provenance Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

[22] Girl in Yellow Holding Baby, c.1959–63

The girl’s hair is black, against black, the baby yellow on yellow on her lap. Legs and arms are a swirl of pentimenti as she bounces him on her knee, girl and artist knowing it won’t be long before his insistence will take them back to the street and to the next adventure.

[22] Girl in Yellow Holding Baby, c.1959–63 pastel on paper, 62.5 x 41.5 cm illustrated Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p. 6

[23] One of the Samsons, c.1955 pastel on paper, 28 x 30.5 cm exhibited Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1967, cat. 60 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED884; Tillywhally Gallery, Kinross; Loomshop Gallery, Lower Largo; Private collection, Edinburgh

[24] Boy with Elastic Band, 1962 pastel on paper, 27.5 x 22 cm signed on label verso exhibited Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1962

[25] Boy in Red Jumper

He sits still, for now, perhaps full of the cold, his hands gripped together clasped between his knees, likely the suggestion of the artist. His blue, school shorts flare on either side of his wee legs. Jumper red, background orange, and his face dirty, colour returning in front of the studio stove into which he stares, breathing noisily through his open mouth. Eardley’s favourite medium for drawing, particularly in Glasgow, was pastel. Her ability to pull the pastel across the sheet (sometimes a fine emery paper), work with her fingers, use a decisive line to pick out or suggest detail are all characteristic. These works are never highly finished; she enjoyed pentimenti (after all her subject was constantly on the move) and as with street photography which fascinated her, the composition is often abruptly curtailed. Conversely, if she has ‘run out of room’ on her sheet another can be added. Boy in Red Jumper would essentially have been finished in a few minutes: the time that the toddler would submit to sitting still, which lends these works an urgency and truth unique in British painting.

[25] Boy in Red Jumper, c.1960–62 pastel on paper, 27 x 23 cm provenance Roland Browse & Delbanco, London; Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow, Castlegate House Gallery, Cockermouth; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

Catterline

Catterline, c.1960. Photograph by Audrey Walker Left: No.1 Catterline, where Eardley moved in c.1954. After moving to No.18 she used this cottage as a store. Right: No.18 Catterline, purchased by Eardley in 1959 where she lived until her death.

Catterline in Context

n 1950, a few weeks before her 29th birthday, Joan Eardley had a solo exhibition at the Gaumont Cinema in Aberdeen. She stayed with the Soper family in Stonehaven south of Aberdeen and while with them visited Catterline, a further seven miles south. The older properties in the village are now all slate roofed. When Eardley first knew it some of the buildings still retained original red Dutch pantiles but these, by the 1950s were porous and were being replaced. Some red roofed buildings are seen in some of Eardley’s earliest images of Catterline. Eardley’s first paintings of Catterline date from 1950 and for the next 10 years she increasingly visited and stayed in the village first through Annette Stephen (née Soper) offering free use of a property, renting her own cottage in 1954 and then buying one in 1959. At the time the village had a population of around 80 people and was unusual in that it had both fishermen and farmworkers as residents. The fishermen tended to stay in the older cottages looking down over the bay and its harbour. Though not exclusively, the families that worked the land tended to live off the brow of the hill in six local authority homes that faced away from the coast. Eardley’s paintings reflect this rather unusual dual nature of the village. There are paintings of land and sea. These paintings do not ignore the human activity

in either arena in that the harbour and boats frequently appear in the coastal paintings and the marks of human beings appear in the landscapes, but unlike the painter’s Glasgow paintings, which she continued to paint, people are never the focus. This absence of people does not reflect a lack of engagement with the community she chose to live in. Eardley was welcomed and accepted in Catterline and in turn felt a part of the village. In cavalry twill trousers and warm dark sweaters, her hair cut like Sybil Thorndike playing Joan of Arc, she was a familiar sight working outside in all weather. The image offered of her in some of the fancifully sentimental versions of her Catterline life has her as poor, isolated and underappreciated. That is wrong on all counts. Joan Eardley was a quiet, gentle, middle-class woman from the relentlessly middleclass Bearsden area of Glasgow. She was a considerable success as a painter, winning travelling scholarships, being invited to participate in exhibitions by the Arts Council, holding solo exhibitions in The Scottish Gallery and Cork Street in London and being elected ARSA. The paintings have a dramatic power and expressive gestural handling that lend themselves to fictions of personal emotional angst, but in reality they are very well thought through both in technique and in composition.

Joan Eardley painting in Catterline, 1961. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Eardley owned and used a 1949 copy of Max Doerner’s The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting. The continuing soundness of the heavy impasto paint and sometimes encaustic are a testimony to her understanding of her materials. Compositionally the paintings are often strongly affected by the particular painting problems presented by their subject matter. The coastal paintings on occasion look down into the horn of Catterline Bay and use the high viewpoint as a way to limit the area of sky. Sometimes they anchor the composition to a vertical element such as a building, rock or boat, using that element to draw the viewer into the painted space. That is seen clearly in Grey Beach and Sky (cat. 37). The unstable sweeping rush of the sea is held by the left hand third of the painting with the Sugar Lump rock, cliff on the far left and the boat and shed between. The blue boat roots the painting in the fact that this is a harbour, for all that the harbour, which in reality sits below and to the right of the Sugar Lump, is subsumed by the stormy sea. The boat, the Linfall, skippered by Harry Criggie at the time, also

alludes to the people of Catterline and the community to which Eardley belonged. The boat was one of four then operating out of the harbour and was for winter ‘great line’ fishing. In the summer, the fishermen worked together in paid employment on the salmon coble, using the flat-bottomed, clinker-built boat to fish the ‘fixed engine’ static nets running out to sea on poles and set at ninety degrees to the shore. The high-prowed coble also appears in Eardley’s sea paintings. Many of the other coastal paintings address a problem encountered by all painters of the sea – that is how to paint the largely flat, largely horizontal plane running away from their point of vision with little or no available fixed or vertical elements to use to create the illusion of space. In the paintings in this exhibition Eardley can be seen dealing with that by tilting the horizon (Seascape, 1961, cat. 36) or using the violence of the sea to generate change. The elements of human activity, in Grey Beach and Sky and a sense of the specificity of time and place are very often central to the paintings. They work as emotionally powerful images

Left: Joan Eardley, Catterline, Summer 1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker Opposite: Joan Eardley painting the sea in Catterline, 1960. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Catterline, Beehives, July, 1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

because they are both dramatically expressive pieces of painting, independent of subject, yet simultaneously rooted firmly in a particular landscape. That was not always recognised at the time. A London critic of Eardley’s work observed that while they were undeniably great examples of painting, the artist was unable to free herself from the shackles of representation and embrace pure abstraction. Her work was consequently unfavourably compared to the Cornwall based painter Peter Lanyon who was portrayed as having successfully abandoned the link to the observed world. That is a complete misunderstanding of Eardley’s work (and probably Lanyon’s). It is in the tension between the existence of the painting as a created object with its own logic and its own all-consuming visual language, yet simultaneously a painting of this very specific place

in this particular time and on occasion John Watt’s boat or David Argo’s farm, that give these works their power. The landscape images notably, and unusually, address often very similar problems to the sea paintings. The Mearns landscape is largely flat, largely treeless and often quite desolate. It has none of the softer, more fertile, more rolling, more wooded qualities of Angus just fifteen miles to the south. Like the sea there are few vertical elements in Mearns landscape. Eardley’s work in urban Glasgow focusses on very different subjects in a very different environment. The children often portrayed offer an immediate complex social engagement. The tenement walls, sometimes chalked on and punctuated by doors and windows solve the problem for the artist of what the subject is, how the viewer will read it and how the painting functions

Joan Eardley, outside the Watch House, Catterline, 1955. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Joan Eardley at No.1 Catterline, 1956. Photograph by Audrey Walker

as a representation of the world. They provide the specificity of time and place to set alongside/against the independent status of the paintings as objects in their own right. The Catterline landscapes, like the sea paintings very rarely depict people, so that particular marker of locus is absent. Eardley addressed both the problem of painting a place and the problem of the representation of the flatness of the land with the same decision. She painted from her feet to the horizon. The land curls up in front of the viewer from the very immediate individual stalks of plants to the distant horizon. Hedgerow (cat. 27) offers just that with a huge seed-head dominating the centre of the composition but a distant horizon opening up beyond. Sometimes the insistence on the physical world results in pieces of the immediate surroundings being picked up

and pushed into the heavy painted surface. That is commonly just grit and fragments of plant material but in Catterline Landscape, 1962 (cat. 33) there are pieces of grass in the bottom right. Joan Eardley lived in Catterline. She did not simply use it as a painting ground. She inhabited the village and its community and readily engaged with others there. The paintings are truly great because they manage to both convey that shared experience while also effortlessly taking their place as important markers in the evolution of British 20th century expressionist painting. PROFESSOR JOHN MORRISON

A Village Life

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 Gaumont Cinema in Aberdeen in 1950 and met Annette Soper 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 (1932–2020) 7.1.2013

Joan Eardley perched over the sea at Catterline, c.1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

Joan Eardley, Catterline, July, 1959. Photograph by Audrey Walker

[26] Ripening Barley

Ripening Barley is a substantial drawing, of a scale that might well have been intended for exhibition. Eardley has hunkered down, or sat with her board, amongst the tall stems of barley. A high summer sun warms the back of her neck and the only sounds might have been the rustling of a field mouse or the chaffing of the heavy barley seeds as a gentle wind passes over.

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[26] Ripening Barley, c.1960–62 gouache, 43 x 35.5 cm exhibited Joan Eardley RSA – Paintings & Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2007 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh

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[27] Hedgerow, c.1961–62 gouache on tinted paper, 37 x 45 cm exhibited Christmas Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1966, cat. 7 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED1234; The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Private collection, Edinburgh illustrated Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p. 78

I’ve got a series of paintings going at the end of my old cottage – the one you stayed in – no. 1 – almost the same spot as I painted last year. I never seem to find I want to move. It’s a lovely spot as no one comes near and I can always work away undisturbed. I just go from one painting to another... it’s oats this year – barley it was last year – so it’s a bit different and there’s a wee windblown tree and that’s all. But every day and every week it looks a bit different – flowers come and go and the colour grows – so it seems silly to shift about. I just leave my paintings out there, and my easel and my palette. And I have another painting table down there and I paint my flowers in pots when I don’t feel like being up there. Painting reduced to its minimum! Letter from Joan Eardley to Margot Sandeman, August 1962, from cottage no.18

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[28] Barley Field, c.1961–62 pastel on paper, 22 x 21 cm exhibited William J. Macaulay Collection, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1979, cat. 15; Joan Eardley, The Scottish Gallery, London, 1990, cat. 25 provenance William J. Macaulay, Edinburgh; Private collection, Edinburgh illustrated Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p. 58

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[29] Storm over the Sea, Catterline, c.1961–63 pastel on paper, 25.2 x 20.1 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, In Context, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2015, cat. 25 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED1401; The collection of J.G. Scott, Edinburgh

Eardley was a prolific pastellist. She found the medium very immediate and practical for use in front of the subject. In Catterline, the sea and sky could be captured with deft strokes, rubbing and swift black marks to define a sweep of rain or impeding storm.

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[30] Beehives, c.1958–62 watercolour and pastel, 15.8 x 23.3 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964, cat. 120 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED51; Private collection, London

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[31] Corn Stooks, near Catterline, c.1958–62 pastel on paper, 27 x 37.5 cm provenance The artist’s studio inventory number ED1265

Eardley made many drawings in the fields behind the coast, particularly in late summer and autumn. Sometimes she would be thinking about painting and perhaps add a strip of paper to extend the composition, but more often she drew as part of a process towards making art, interacting with her subject – a detail, a vignette or in other drawings not much more than colour notes. More than 1300 drawings were eventually catalogued in her studio inventory after she died and so much of her personality is embedded in these works: charming, poignant, urgent, each an expression of the artists very being. Corn Stooks is direct observation – she uses pen and ink to record the low stooks and has taken particular care to capture hue of the cut field: green, brown, ochre.

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[32] Tree and Haystacks, Sunset, c.1957–60 oil on board, 30 x 22 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, Restless Talent, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017, cat. 13 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number EE219

When in Catterline, the artist liked to walk inland around the fields and farms, often bringing a sketchpad or a rucksack with oil paints. She liked the wind-blasted trees, where cattle would shelter; she loved the low winter sun and distinctive profile of the Kincardineshire haystacks as depicted here. For Eardley, there was enough inspiration for a lifetime of painting and more, and this drove the urgency in her work: the sense that nature would not be tamed or oblige with the same conditions ever again; her response was to work tirelessly, which ironically must have contributed to her final illness.

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[33] Catterline Landscape, 1962

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[33] Catterline Landscape, 1962 oil on board, 94 x 104 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964, cat. 4 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number EE318; Private collection, Yorkshire

Eardley’s great, late subject is the landscape at Catterline. Sometimes she looks out to sea, or as here, she paints the field edges behind the cliff. Barley ripens in the field, the odd tree blasted by salt winds is a bowed sentinel, but below, the profusion of growth, of grasses and field flowers thrums with life. Eardley will take their stems and press them into her impasto and will draw into the paint with the brush end to describe the dense cover, which might contain a sitting partridge or elusive corncrake. It is a wilderness contrived by centuries of agriculture, the land worked through the natural rhythm of the year into which Eardley immersed herself. But she was not content to tie up the boat in a storm; her response to wild weather was to get to a vantage point and address it full frontal with brushes and oil paint. A clear blue sky is the enemy of the landscape painter and in Catterline Landscape, a dark sky and dirty light promises a squall; she has worked with urgency to catch it breaking over the hard escarpment of the coast.

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[34] Cottages, Catterline, 1961 oil on board, 25.5 x 26.5 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964, cat. 57 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number EE258

Sky and ground and roof are dark, the brightest points are the linen on the washing line. At the back of the cottage, light from a tilly lamp illuminates the little garden, contained by long grasses and a rickety fence. Dusk comes quick on a late summer’s evening; soon the lamp will be extinguished and the only light will be celestial. The cottage has been identified as the back of no.10 South Row. Eardley lived at the far end of the same row at no.1 from around 1954. In 1959 she purchased no.18 which had an upstairs bedroom with working electricity.

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[35] Winter Sea, c.1961 oil, sand & gesso on board, 26.5 x 29.75 cm signed lower left exhibited Joan Eardley Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1961; Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Scottish Arts Council Memorial Exhibition, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and subsequent tour, 1964, cat. 104 provenance: Mr. and Mrs. Dallmeyer, Aberlady

Sometimes the artist would put a skim of plaster on her board and then score into it, allowing the marks to persist even after the painting was finished. This is part of her technical bravery and inventiveness and a means to get started, to mitigate the tentative beginning – perfect mark on pristine surface. She also mixed her pigment with light gravel and sand, particularly as she sought to find the painterly means to capture the foaming violence of a winter sea. This painting may be small in scale, and she had no qualms about setting up a large board in range of the sea’s salt spray, but the power it represents is awesome (a much, recently abused adjective). The dark, stony shore is spume-flecked, the sea in roiling tumult, the livid sky making no promise of abating. But upper right, the orange glow of the Todhead Light affords the sailor, and all humanity, some respite from nature’s fury.

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Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013

[36] Seascape, c.1961 oil on board with newspaper, 38 x 35 cm exhibited 20th Century Scottish Paintings and Drawings, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1976 provenance Private collection, Edinburgh illustrated Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, front cover and p. 180

Though domestic in scale, this work has all the drama of a great painting, demonstrating how the artist can work in any scale without dampening her expressive power. She wrote in 1958 of the travails of winter working in Catterline: ‘This morning there was gentle wind from the south-east bringing in little showers of snow every now and then. You could watch them several miles away coming across the sea. And in between the snow showers was something of quietness and gentle greyness – so I was able to paint fairly peacefully.’

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[37] Grey Beach and Sky, 1962 oil on board, 56 x 107.5 cm signed and dated on verso

‘Three large canvases all worked throughout the day from my front door or thereabouts. It has been a perfect painting day – Not as regards climate! (I wore a fur coat for the first time). But for beauty quite perfect – A big sea – with lovely light – greyness and blowing swirling mists – and latterly a strong wind blowing from the south, blowing up great froths of whiteness off the sea, like soap suds onto the field behind our wee house – And towards evening the sun appeared shrouded in heavy mist – and turned yellow and orange and red, with great swirls of mist obscuring her every now and again – I wanted so much to paint the sun but it meant turning round and leaving my sea – or else running round paints and all to the other side of the bay. And I just hadn’t time or energy to do this – Tomorrow perhaps there will be the possibility of this sun again and I can take up my position, the other side, by the minister’s house. I think it could be good there.’ Joan Eardley, extract from a letter, Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p. 21

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[38] Jar of Summer Flowers, 1962

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[38] Jar of Summer Flowers, 1962 oil on canvas, 76 x 56 cm exhibited Joan Eardley RSA, 1921–1963, Scottish Arts Council Memorial Exhibition, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh and subsequent tour, 1964, cat. 111; Joan Eardley Retrospective Exhibition, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and The Hayward Gallery, London, 1988, cat. 136 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number EE89; Mrs Patricia Black; Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow illustrated Joan Eardley by Christopher Andreae, Lund Humphries, 2013, p. 178

Despite her progressive illness, Joan Eardley kept painting and drawing as long as she could. She was nursed at home in Catterline by her friends and when she could no longer work outside, her subject matter came inside. In this painting, she has gathered wild flowers and grasses from the field edges to make what would become her final subject. Jar of Summer Flowers acts as a final beacon of light, signifying her defiance in the face of adversity and unerring instinct for her subject: honest, direct and moving. It is one of a group made in the summer of 1962 before she was admitted to hospital in Killearn where she died the following year on 16th August. The subject relates closely to the summer field paintings in oil and gouache of previous years where the wild profusion of nature, humming with insect life, warmth and pollen is immersive. But now the flowers have been picked, brought home and placed, rather than arranged, in a simple earthenware pot, light falling softly from a little window. The work has become intensely poignant, a memento mori but at the same time full of the love that is expressed in all her work.

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[39] Sunset Landscape, 1963 oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5 cm exhibited Joan Eardley, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964, cat. 49; Modern British Heroines, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2014, cat. 5 provenance The artist’s studio inventory number EE338; Private collection, Edinburgh

Joan Eardley is surely one of the very few artists today about whom one can honestly say that her heart is the core of her experience and that the nature of her experience is vastly more important to her than the way she paints it. And yet the texture of her paint, the impetuous brushstrokes, the gradations of colour and sudden explosions of dramatic light are exactly what they ought to be. Like Turner, she paints as though the brush were an integral part of her personality. No slickness here, no tricks, no elegance. Just a trial and error attempt to convey the painterly equivalent of what she so intensely wants to convey. Eric Newton, reviewing her 1963 London exhibition in The Guardian.

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Flood Tide Joan Eardley Lonely people are drawn to the sea. Not for this artist the surge and glitter of salons, Clutch of a sherry or making polite conversation. See her when she is free: – Striding into the salty bluster of a cliff-top In her paint-splashed corduroys, Humming as she recalls the wild shy boys She sketched in the city, allowing nature’s nations Of grasses and wild shy flowers to stick To the canvas they were blown against By the mighty Catterline wind – All becomes art, and as if it was incensed By the painter’s brush the sea growls up In a white flood. The artist’s cup Is overflowing with what she dares To think is joy, caught unawares As if on the wing. A solitary clover, Unable to read WET PAINT, rolls over Once, twice, and then it’s fixed, Part of a field more human than the one That took the gale and is now As she is, beyond the sun. Edwin Morgan, 2005

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Waves at Catterline. Photograph by Audrey Walker

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Joan Eardley RSA (1921–1963) 1938 1939 1940 1942 1943 1946 1947–48 1948–49 1949 1950 1951 1952 1952 1955 1956 1959 1960 1962 1963

Born in Sussex in 1921 and moved with the family to London in 1926 Entered Goldsmith’s College of Art, London Moved with mother and grandmother to Bearsden, Glasgow Enrolled at The Glasgow School of Art First stay at Corrie on Arran Diploma in Drawing and Painting, The Glasgow School of Art Sir James Guthrie Prize for portraiture Enlisted as a boat-builder’s labourer until the end of the war Lived for a time in London Studied for six months under James Cowie at Hospitalfield, Arbroath Elected professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists Awarded post-Diploma from Glasgow with travelling scholarship Carnegie Bursary, RSA students’ exhibition Travelling in Italy and France Working in Cochrane Street studio, in Glasgow Travelling scholarship work shown at The Glasgow School of Art Painting in Port Glasgow Summer in France Moved to Townhead studio, Glasgow First work in Catterline where she later bought property Elected Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy First visit to Caverslee, near Selkirk Increasingly working at Catterline Visited and worked in Comrie, Perthshire Guest tutor at Hospitalfield First signs of serious illness Elected Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy 16th August died at Killearn Hospital

Joan Eardley and Vespa, Catterline. Photograph by Audrey Walker

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1949 1950 1952 1954 1955 1958 1959 1960 1961 1963

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS The Glasgow School of Art (Travelling Scholarship work) Solo Exhibition, Gaumont Gallery, Aberdeen Eight Young Contemporary British Painters, Arts Council (Scottish Committee) Touring exhibition. Six Young Painters, Parson’s Gallery, London (organised by Col. Robert Henriques and David Cleghorn Thomson) 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 Two-person show with William Gillies during the Edinburgh Festival, The Scottish Gallery Solo Exhibition, Edinburgh Festival, 57 Gallery, Edinburgh Contemporary British Landscape, Arts Council of Great Britain, Touring exhibition (into 1961) Solo Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 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, Edinburgh (subsequent posthumous solo exhibitions of work by Joan Eardley have been held by The Scottish Gallery in 1981, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1996) 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, Edinburgh 2007–08 Joan Eardley, Retrospective Exhibition, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh 2013 Joan Eardley, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and Portland Gallery, London 2015 Joan Eardley, In Context, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2016–17 Joan Eardley, A Sense of Place, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 2017 Joan Eardley, Restless Talent, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2021 Centenary, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Joan Eardley and Catterline, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh Joan Eardley, Perth Museum and Art Gallery Joan Eardley, A Painter’s Life with Photographs by Audrey Walker, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

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Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition JOAN EARDLEY 1921 CENTENARY 2021 30 July – 28 August 2021 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/eardleycentenary ISBN: 978 1 91290038 1 Designed by Kenneth Gray Photography by John McKenzie Archive images with kind permission of the Walker estate Printed by PurePrint 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.

Cover: Winter Sea, c.1961 (detail) (cat. 35) oil, sand & gesso on board, 26.5 x 29.75 cm

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Scottish Gallery would like to thank Anne Morrison-Hudson for supporting this exhibition and for championing Joan Eardley throughout her centenary year. Thanks also to Lachlan Goudie, Professor John Morrison and Naomi Robertson from Dovecot Studios for their catalogue essays. Our thanks to the Walker estate for use of archive images. Thanks also to Patrick Elliott at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Helen Scott at the City Art Centre. Sincere thanks to the family of J.G. Scott, and all the lenders for contributing works to the exhibition. The poems reproduced on page 66 and 136 were written by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920– 2020). To Joan Eardley was first published in The Second Life by Edinburgh University Press in 1968 and Flood Tide by The Herald on 3/9/2016, as part of their Poem of the Day series.

1921

CENTENARY 2021