Joan Eardley was one of the most original and admired British artists of her generation. Her powerful and expressive paintings transformed her everyday surroundings, including the rugged Scottish coastline and...
Joan Eardley was one of the most original and admired British artists of her generation. Her powerful and expressive paintings transformed her everyday surroundings, including the rugged Scottish coastline and Glasgow's streets and children. Eardley was one of a generation of artists drawn to post-war urban poverty and childhood and a vanishing world. She often portrayed children against the backdrop of boarded up shops and buildings damaged by the war. Her intense looking and her method of drawing affirm her admiration for Van Gogh, and an affinity between her urban work and his involvement with the coal mining district of the Borinage, in Belgium, has often been noted.. During her lifetime she was considered a member of the post war British avant-garde, who portrayed the realities of life in the mid-twentieth century.
A painter’s painter, who created a unique visual language which has been much emulated, Eardley’s raw, yet tender, depictions of children in 1950s Glasgow contrast vividly with her loose and expressive landscapes painted around Catterline in the north east of Scotland.
Eardley’s star burned brightly in the post-war years before she died at the age of 42 in 1963. Almost 60 years later, her work is being constantly re-evaluated and rediscovered by new generations of collectors.
Joan Eardley moved to Bearsden, on the outskirts of Glasgow in 1940, when she was nineteen years old. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art over a period of eight years in the 1940s and retained a base in the city for the rest of her life. Her first studio after returning from post-graduate travels was at 21 Cochrane Street, near George Square, which she rented from 1949. Three years later, she moved to 204 St James Road in the nearby Townhead district. The area, of mixed residential and light industrial use, was overcrowded and dilapidated. However, Eardley was drawn to its vibrancy and close-knit community.
In 1959 she explained: ‘I like the friendliness of the back streets. Life is at its most uninhibited here. Dilapidation is often more interesting to a painter as is anything that has been used and lived with – whether it be an ivy-covered cottage, a broken farm-cart or an old tenement.’(as quoted in Patrick Elliott and Anne Galastro, Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2016, p.14).
Eardley became a regular sight in the streets of Townhead, sketching buildings, people and scenes of daily life in chalks and pastels, which she then worked up into paintings in the studio. Her images of the local children are particularly celebrated, some of whom affectionately recall her kindness towards them, including the provision of snacks whilst they sat for her.
The city of Glasgow provided not only subject matter but also supported Eardley’s professional standing: she received her first solo exhibition at her alma mater in 1949, whilst the first of her paintings to enter a public collection was Catterline Coastguard Cottages of 1951, which was acquired the year after its creation by Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (accession number 2963). So much development took place in Glasgow during Eardley’s lifetime and has continued apace since her death in 1963 that, in turn, her depictions of its architecture and residents have become an important record of its history.
“this richness that Glasgow has – I hope it always will have – a living thing … as long as Glasgow has this I’ll always want to paint.”
Eardley took a studio on the corner of McAslin Street and St. James' Road in Townhead late in 1949. She kept this base till her death in 1963, returning frequently even after moving to Catterline in 1955, and being in the studio almost daily in the period 1950-55. The English-born Eardley came to Glasgow in 1940, aged 18, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Though from a middle class background Eardley responded to the scenes of domestic street life in Glasgow. She loved Glasgow and talked of its great richness.
“Joan Eardley is one of the greatest painters in Scottish art history. Very few female Scottish artists have received the attention and recognition that they deserve. In my opinion however, Joan’s name would top any list that set out to acknowledge the most important female painters ever to have put brush to canvas in Scotland. No artist has painted Glasgow’s inner city the way Eardley did and very few have matched her visionary approach to painting the coastline of Scotland. 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.”