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framed dimensions: 105.5 x 139 cm
signed lower right; signed and titled verso
Breaking Wave is one of Joan Eardley’s monumental seascapes, a painting that delivers the raw, physical force of the northeast winter coast with an intensity few artists have matched. A towering wave, charged with movement and foam, hurls itself toward the shore, the energy of its crash held in suspended motion. The eye is drawn to the long sweep of deep red shoreline, vivid against the steel-toned sea. Above, a thick band of grey sky hangs heavy, full of weather and foreboding, yet within it glimmers the faint presence of a low winter sun. Its light is diffused but perceptible, adding a quiet, haunting tension to the storm-driven scene. Though Eardley moved to Catterline in the early 1950s, she did not begin painting the sea until several years later. She needed to feel ready to paint the sea, to meet the power of it head on. When she did, the results were extraordinary. Eardley, who trained at Glasgow School of Art, forged a uniquely Scottish expressionism, whether it was her Glasgow subject or in these late, seascape paintings. She distilled something timeless and deeply human: our confrontation with the power of the natural world. In Breaking Wave, we don’t just witness a moment – we stand at the edge of it, in awe of sea, sky, and the storm’s pulse. Breaking Wave was first acquired by Mr and Mrs Proudfoot, former Directors of The Scottish Gallery, further reinforcing the significance of Breaking Wave within the artist’s body of work.
EXHIBITED:
Scottish Paintings for Canada, The Auditorium Foyer, Toronto, Canada, 1961; Joan Eardley, RSA (1921-1963): A Memorial Exhibition, Arts Council of Great Britain, Scottish Committee, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, 1964, cat.99, as ‘Breaking Wave, Kincardineshire’; Joan Eardley, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 2003.
PROVENANCE:
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1962; Mr and Mrs G.R. Proudfoot, Durham, by 1964; Fine Art Society, London, 2003; Collection of Peregrine Pollen.
ILLUSTRATED:
Christopher Andreae, Joan Eardley, Lund Humphries, 2013, p.184, no.175, illustrated, as ‘Seascape’, dated circa 1959-63
There is an enduring fascination for Joan Eardley far beyond her unconventional life and early death at the age of forty-two. Born in 1921 in Sussex, Joan Eardley’s family moved to Scotland in 1939 and a year later she joined the Glasgow School of Art. She found subjects in the shipyards of Clydebank and the slums of Townhead, at first the run-down tenements and buildings and later the children and streetlife around Rottenrow where the character of the people and the place became the vital subject of her work. Her art education was finished with scholarship visits to Paris and the cities of Renaissance Italy and back in Scotland she ventured with her art school friends to Arran and back to the south of France. By the fifties, Joan Eardley divided her life between her studio in Townhead and the fishing village of Catterline, a place she had discovered in the North East of Scotland. Eardley felt at ease in these two contrasting localities and over the succeeding decade, as if by accident, she created an epic vision of the world from no more than two streets and one small fishing hamlet. The slums of Townhead are no more, the harsh realities memorialised by the honesty of her vision, the spirit of the people invested in its children captured, enduring like no other example in the history of art. Catterline remains unchanged and the village is inevitably a place of pilgrimage for the thousands who admire the artist’s deep-felt engagement with nature on the Kincardineshire coast. The Scottish Gallery held its first Joan Eardley exhibition in 1955 and later her memorial in 1964.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions:
1955 (Festival), 1958 (Festival), 1961, 1964 (Festival and Memorial), 1981, 1983, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1996, 2007, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2021 (Centenary)
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