The Sea VII, 1963

The Sea VII is the last monumental Catterline painting made by Joan Eardley.  She has signed and dated the work on the verso: Joan Eardley 1963.  Her late paintings are seldom signed on the front and a signature can be associated with a work being send off for exhibition.  Exactly when The Sea VII was started is not known but it belongs to the winter of 1962/63 and it was finished and signed for her final exhibition at Roland Browse and Delbanco in London (organised by The Scottish Gallery) which took place in May-June 1963. The exhibition included thirty-five works, all in oils.  There are five black and white illustrations in the catalogue including: The Sea No 7 (sic) oil on board, 37 x 60.5 inches, priced at 275 guineas.  Included also are The Sea numbers 1,2,3,4 5 6 and 8, although several are smaller in scale.  This series of sea paintings began in the winter of 1960/1961 and the first four were included in the exhibition at The Scottish Gallery in May 1961, reviewed by Sidney Goodsir Smith for the Scotsman:

“As you enter the main gallery you are met on the far wall with a great wall of sea coming in, straight at you, and coming with speed.  There is nothing else in the large six-footer, not a rock, not a cloud in the flat dirty, really dirty brown sky – just sheer sea.  This is flanked by two other tempestuous scenes, while to their right is another enormous wave.  This is a tremendous series, “The Sea I, II, III, IV.”

Goodsir Smith wrote of the exhibition “This is an explosive show but not destructive.  You enter, you are shattered; you remain; you find it difficult to leave and when you do the pictures are still with you.  I nail my colours to the mast and declare Miss |Eardley a boneless wonder, a magician.”

It is hard to underestimate the sense of significance, of importance to the art world of these last exhibitions and of the series of Winter Sea paintings and yet tragically less than four months after the show opened in London Eardley died of breast cancer.

Ann Steed in her catalogue essay about Lil Neilson (Into the Light, Aberdeen Art Gallery, 1999), quoted significantly from a letter written by Joan to Lil in 1963. In her last month’s, Joan had been working frenetically for what was her last exhibition, at Roland, Browse & Delbanco. This last year was crucial in Eardley’s development. She was, in her own words, propelling her art towards a place which ‘hangs between reality and abstraction’. Steed concludes that Joan’s ‘late paintings achieve an exquisite balance, poised between the two’ – between reality and abstraction.

The Sea VII can be seen as her last monumental work, the climax of a series which propelled the artist into the centre of art world attention and provided brilliant, poignant resolution of her painterly need to reconcile the power of nature and abstract expressionism.  Several other works in the series are in permanent, Museum collections: The Sea III in the Government Art Collection and The Sea II in the Kirklees Museum, Huddersfield.  Patrick Elliott in his catalogue essay for the exhibition Land and Sea A Life in Catterline, 2021 speculates that it was the Kirklees painting referred to by Audrey Walker in a letter from the winter of 1963.

“We had a terrible time getting these vast boards down to the shore and anchoring them against the tremendous easterly gale.  And then she stood and worked heroically (I mean the word truthfully) till the light had gone.  Everything was iced over, even down at the shore and the cold was intense.”

The viewing point for these works is right down at sea level so that the power of the sea is palpable. The smell of ozone and the cold blast of the wind are somehow contained in her painting.  Eardley did not tolerate the weather; she revelled in it.  Brewing gales and an ominous shipping forecast would lead her to pack her bag and head from Glasgow to Catterline.

Elliot also quotes correspondence from Lilian Browse at the end of the exhibition, wishing the artist well for her forthcoming operation,

“Your exhibition has really been one of the greatest successes from the point of view of prestige and sales that we have ever held of a contemporary artist.”  Only four remained unsold, two under consideration.

What might have happened to the artist had she lived is speculation.  Even in her short life she produced one of the greatest bodies of work of any post War British painter.

In The Sea VII the furious tumult of sea arrives in a great, foaming wave and crashes, dissipating rapidly as spume of the bed of rock in the shallows of the bay, below the dark sands in the foreground. The artist has added crumpled newspaper to create physical dimension to her impasto. The sky is unrelenting driving the storm across the North Sea, the whole a vision of awe in which we can participate, a remarkable, final tribute to the vision of Joan Eardley.

Guy Peploe | The Scottish Gallery