About this lot

Description

§ Attributed to Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley, RSA (Scottish 1921-1963)
Landscape with a horse signed 'Joan Eardley' (lower right) oil on board 33 x 43.5cm

Footnote: Despite the brevity of her career, which lasted little over fifteen years, Joan Eardley has become one of Scotland’s most venerated artists. Born in 1921 and moving with her mother and sister to Glasgow in 1939, Eardley trained at Glasgow School of Art from 1940 and returned in 1947 for her post-diploma studies. Whilst Eardley’s contemporaries, who included Eduardo Paolozzi, Robert Colquhuon, Robert MacBryde, and William Turnbull, left Scotland to live and work in London, Eardley remained, drawn to the destitute streets and overcrowded tenements of Glasgow’s Townhead area. Describing Townhead, Eardley commented, “Life is at its most uninhabited here…Dilapidation is often more interesting to a painter” (Patrick Elliott and Anna Galastro, Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place, National Galleries Scotland, 2016, p.14). From 1950, after staying with a friend in the coastal village of Catterline, located just south of Aberdeen, Eardley began splitting her time between there and Glasgow, and in 1961, after spending more than a decade painting the young residents of Townhead, Eardley became a full-time resident of the small coastal community. She continued to live and work in Catterline until her premature death, just two years later. Typified by her use of powerful, authoritative brushstrokes and expressive palette, Eardley’s formal style is reflective of her two favoured subjects: the impoverished children of Townhead, Glasgow, which defined her early career, and her later depictions of the wild, rugged coastline of Catterline. The present lot is believed to have been executed during the latter part of Eardley’s career, dating from the late 1950s or early 1960s following her move to Catterline. As with the present lot, many of Eardley’s canvases were left unresolved as she required near-identical conditions before she would attempt to continue any unfinished works. Corresponding with her friend, Audrey Walker, Eardley wrote “these things take so long to work out. So much dependent on so much – type of day, place of sun, place of tide” (Elliott and Galastro, p.63).

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