![]() She came to know about a dozen families, and was especially fond of the large Samson family whom she painted over seven years or more. They would turn up, asking to be painted, no doubt foreseeing the sweets they could buy with the few pence she gave them. And I have become known in the district, in George St, and all the streets round about.” Initially the children came to her studio simply in order to watch her at work, but soon became for her a major subject. And so easy to get the slum children to come up. “It’s desperate to lose the studio … it is so near the slum parts that I draw. The loss of the first caused her much anxiety. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2016Įardley had two studios, one after another, in the Townhead area. The brushwork is brusque, almost nonchalant, suggesting a confidence that feels no need to impress.įields Under Snow, 1958. Eardley carries the eye across the surface by means of small connecting passages, without forcing the interest at any point. Yet the 4ft-wide picture has an impressive scale. It captures the carter beside his horse, lighting a cigarette while he waits for goods to be unloaded from the harbour glimpsed in the background. Here, seen for the first time since the 1950s, is A Carter and His Horse, which the Government Art Collection bought in 1952 and then loaned to the British Embassy in Tokyo for decades. These early mature oils suggest that she painted as a bird sings – not unknowingly but unselfconsciously. The studio room in which her friend Angus Neil stands gaunt and alone is as gloomily dramatic as any James Pryde, but what electrifies the scene is the unmediated ultramarine shadow that runs down his back and cuts across the floor. These works, although localised, have an international context, for they align Eardley with the emphatic return to realism, across many European countries, during the aftermath of war. The current exhibition begins in the 1950s, with the Townhead drawings and paintings, produced after several months’ study in Paris and Italy, funded by the award of two scholarships. And though she cultivated an up-to-date knowledge of art, she turned her back on artistic fads, searching instead for the innate energy in her subjects, both people and places. Instead she put down roots among the tenement blocks in a condemned part of Glasgow where city planners envisaged a vast motorway interchange, and in a rural outpost, half empty and in decline owing to the greater attraction to the men of work on deep-sea trawlers in Stonehaven or Aberdeen. By nature, Eardley was drawn to dilapidation. Her work, however, would have been very different. Had Eardley hung on to the coattails of her fellow students, the two Roberts – Colquhoun and MacBryde – travelled with them to London, drunk with them in Soho and, like them, borrowed a few modernist mannerisms from the emigre artist Jankel Adler, she might today be better known and easier to pigeonhole. Photograph: Joan Eardley/© Estate of Joan Eardley. She also began exploring the east of the city, sensing that its vitality lay in this direction.Ĭhildren and Chalked Wall 3, 1962-1963. This same year, while almost crippled with shyness, she began frequenting the studio of the Polish artist Josef Herman, then living in Glasgow, whose cursory style of drawing may have freed up her own. Having spent a brief period at Goldsmiths College of Art, Joan began her studies at Glasgow School of Art in January 1940. But late in 1939, mother, grandmother and the two girls moved to Bearsden, a well-to-do suburb north-west of Glasgow, thereby escaping a London threatened with German bombing raids. Her mother decided to take Joan and her younger sister back to her family home at Blackheath, London, to live with their grandmother and aunt. In 1929, when she was just seven, her father, who had been gassed during the first world war and had experienced failure as a dairy farmer, killed himself. She moved to Scotland almost by happenstance. ![]() Yet there are no known plans for this show to travel to any other part of Britain, even though Eardley, acclaimed as an artist of world-class importance, had an English father and was born in Sussex. Currently, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art offers a more focused exhibition, concentrating on her passion for two places: Townhead, a poor part of Glasgow and Catterline, a small fishing village a hundred miles north of Glasgow, on the Kincardineshire coast. In 2007 the National Galleries of Scotland mounted a full retrospective, which attracted a new Scottish audience to her art. J oan Eardley, who died aged only 42 in 1963, is barely known in England.
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