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framed dimensions: 69 x 76 cm
Much has been written about Joan Eardley and the Samsons, a Townhead family of perhaps 12 kids, who drifted in and out of her studio and became the subject for which she is most celebrated. This interior depicts Andrew, the eldest and first of the siblings she painted. It is dated as early as 1949 by Eardley’s biographer Christopher Andreae, but relates closely to her portrait of Angus Neil (page 112 of Joan Eardley, Lund Humphries, 2013). Neil sits passive, eyes downcast, cigarette burning in his fingers, but the boy looks about, posed with elbow on the table, hand tucked into his bomber jacket; he won’t be there for much longer. On the reverse, is an unfinished painting of Townhead with a group of children in the foreground. The view is of the back of the close – an area directly behind the tenement buildings where the drying greens (for hanging washing) were situated; a playground of sorts. It was very common for artists to reverse a picture if they favoured another subject and didn’t want to waste the canvas. Seated Figure with Table is therefore a portrait with interior and exterior combined, which together reflects a period of post-war Britain.
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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