Joan Eardley began her studies at the Glasgow School of Art in 1940, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. She witnessed a difficult period in the history of the city and its surrounding communities when devastating air raids killed many civilians and left large numbers of the population homeless. Later, in the post-war years, she also observed the rapid pace of change, as notorious tenement slums were cleared and the city spread outwards into modern suburbs and newly created satellite towns. In 1949, Eardley rented a room as a studio in Glasgow, and over the following years the local children became her favourite subject. She painted street kids who played outside in the backstreets or congregated around boarded-up shops and bomb-damaged buildings. Despite the obvious poverty of her subjects, her pictures radiate with the energy and vitality of youth. There is also nostalgia for a sense of kinship and belonging that seemed to be disappearing fast as the city was modernised and rebuilt.
In Street Kids, three children are grouped in unaffected intimacy on the pavement. One of them studies a comic, a second chews on an apple while the third is absorbed in his own thoughts. When this early work was shown at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1952, a critic described it as a ‘social document’. Eardley certainly draws our attention to the spindly, undernourished limbs and the ill-fitting clothes of these tenement children who are set against a backdrop of scarred, graffiti-covered walls. As a record of urban life, her works owe something to the contemporary documentary photography of magazines such as Picture Post which in 1948 carried a now famous photostory on Glasgow children from the Gorbals area with images by Bert Hardy and Bill Brandt. Eardley herself was rarely without her camera as she moved around the backstreets of the city. Yet in this and other paintings of Glasgow, the social message is not forced. Eardley’s vigorous handling of paint and the bright patches of colour convey vitality rather than despair and misery. The artist gradually befriended several local families, and large numbers of children would run riot through her studio where, bribed with sandwiches and comics, they would pose for drawings and studies. In an interview towards the end of her life, Eardley recalled the challenge of capturing the raw energy of the children: ‘it’s not possible to get a child to stay still … I watch them moving about and do the best I can … They just let out all their life and energy … and I just watch them and I do try and think about them in painterly terms.’
Alongside her optimistic paintings of life in the city, Eardley was also a great landscapist. In the early 1950s she began painting around the coastal village of Catterline, south of Aberdeen, and within a few years she was spending most of her time there, capturing the changing moods of vast expanses of land and sea under huge skies and punishing weather conditions. Although she continued to paint directly from nature, her gestural handling and her experiments with texture and colour show her awareness of recent trends in expressionist and abstract art in Europe and America. Her premature death in 1963 deprived Eardley of wider international recognition, but she is now one of the best-loved Scottish artists of the twentieth century.
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.