Suffolk Barn with Sugar Beet, 1954
Suffolk Barn with Sugar Beet is a rare and atmospheric work from Joan Eardley’s visit to Suffolk with her close friend Dorothy Steel and her family. Dorothy Steel and Eardley met in 1947 in Glasgow and remained close friends throughout Eardley’s life. Eardley was born in Warnham in Sussex and spent part of her early childhood on a dairy farm. Her visit to Suffolk therefore may have carried personal resonances, reconnecting the artist with the agricultural landscapes and working rural life of southern England.
The distinctive structure of the barn belongs to Suffolk’s vernacular agricultural tradition. Its dramatic oversailing roof, sometimes known as a pentice roof, extends beyond the walls to protect the fragile timber and wattle-and-daub construction from the wet maritime climate of East Anglia. Eardley responds instinctively to the building’s irregular geometry, tilting planes, and weathered surfaces, almost animating the structure.
In the foreground, a mound of harvested sugar beet spills outward in pale ochres, whites, and yellows, contrasting with the dark timber of the barn and the vivid turquoise sky beyond. Executed in ink and gouache on paper, the work possesses the immediacy of something observed directly and rapidly, with Eardley using vigorous line and broad passages of colour to capture the physical character of the place rather than its precise detail.
Eardley visited Suffolk with Dorothy in 1954, staying with Dorothy’s sister and her family.
Suffolk Barn with Sugar Beet reveals many of the qualities that define Eardley’s work: an attraction to weathered structures, working landscapes, and the expressive potential of paint itself. The barn appears battered yet resilient, bedded within the landscape and shaped by the same forces of climate and labour that fascinated Eardley throughout her career. The painting has never previously been exhibited and comes directly from the Eardley Estate, offering a glimpse into a lesser-known strand of the artist’s practice during the mid-1950s.
Provenance:
The artist’s studio, inventory no. ED988
About Joan Eardley
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.
