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framed dimensions: 56 x 32.5 cm
Painted in the final years of Joan Eardley’s life, Summer Fields captures not just the appearance of the Scottish countryside, but its transcience, spirit, and eternal turning. Set behind the fishing village of Catterline, where Eardley lived and worked from the early 1950s, this upright composition radiates warmth, the golden light of a late September evening saturating the fields, while the foreground is filled with dense, textured detail – the fruits of long days, ripening seed heads, tangled grasses, and the promise of a season fulfilled.
Eardley’s relationship with this landscape was intensely personal. She knew every field, tree, bush, and hedgerow, and was acutely in tune with the farmer’s year, its plantings, harvest and cycles of labour. The layers of pigment and texture, the way oil paint has been worked into the board with physical vigour, echo the richness of the land itself. Summer Fields is suffused with poignant awareness, a celebration of summer’s fullness, and a farewell whispered through field and sun.
EXHIBITED:
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1961
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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