Joan Eardley, RSA 1921-1963

'If anything can justify the statement that Eardley was a painter of world class, it is the best of the paintings done in the last years at Catterline. "Such an opinion only makes sense," wrote Douglas Hall. 'if one accepts the basic tenets of modern art on the relationship of the painted surface to the experience that suggested it. In all modern art this relationship is not based on description but on analogy. The tumbled paint in an Eardley landscape is not an attempt to deceive the eye but to produce an analogue to the tumbled water within the terms of a painted canvas.' (Cordelia Oliver, Joan Eardley RSA, 1988, p. 104)