Joan Eardley, RSA

Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh;
Sale: Sotheby's, 25 April 1989, Lot 267;
Private Collection;
Sale: Sotheby's, 20 August 1996, Lot 1230;
Private Collection

The board is sound. There is a minor crack to the board in the upper right corner which is possibly intrinsic to the work. There are light surface scratches in the sky area which again are possibly intrinsic to the work. Very minor paint loss toward the centre of the left edge and a further spot towards the centre of the lower edge, with some further light scratches to the lower edge all of which are possibly intrinsic to the work. Otherwise in good condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no signs of retouching. Held in a simple wooden frame in fair condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Joan Eardley was born in the rural village of Warnham in Sussex in 1921. The Eardley family moved to London when her father, a farmer, joined the Ministry for Agriculture in 1926 only to tragically die two years later. Joan was at school in Blackheath where her artistic talent was recognised however it was not until she moved to Glasgow in 1939 and enrolled at Glasgow School of Art that her formative artistic training began. Her teacher during those years, Hugh Adam Crawford encouraged all his students to "feel their paintings in their bodies", an idea from which Eardley was never able to escape. Crawford recalled the ability of his young student with high regard, stating that, 'her application was constant, intense and serious,' characteristics that would hold true throughout Eardley's career. 

Catterline, a small isolated fishing village on the extreme north-eastern coast of Scotland just south of Stonehaven, became a 'home from home' and a favourite subject of Eardley's work throughout the 1950s. Eardley first visited Catterline, the subject of the present work, in 1951 during a period of convalescence having contracted mumps during a solo exhibition of her work at a space attached to the Gaumont Cinema in Aberdeen. It was on this visit with her friend and local school teacher Annette Soper that Eardley discovered the Watch House was for sale. Within a year of this first visit, the Watch House had been purchased by Soper, made weather tight and converted into the studio which they would share until Eardley finally purchased her own cottage (No. 1, The Row, Catterline) in 1955. It was the sheer physical closeness to nature and its inherent elemental energy which Eardley found so fitting at Catterline; undoubtedly an added attraction was her own primitive dwelling which lacked not just electricity but inside sanitation and running water, enhancing her unfettered experience of nature which she wanted to reflect in her painting.

Eardley tended to paint her Catterline landscapes either from the cliff-top looking dramatically out across the rocky shoreline to the bleak North Sea or from sea level as in the current work. Eardley's unconventional method of painting during raging storms in which both she and her board, clamped to the easel and weighted with stones to combat the wind, would be exposed to repeated lashings of rain, displays her fascination with wild seas and the visual grandeur of storms. The result was a body of work that possessed an acute sense of truth and urgency which is extremely rare. The elongated dimensions of the current work emphasise the panoramic horizon before which Eardley positioned her easel; the focus of this composition is the point at which land, sea and sky merge into a single organic and turbulent elemental symphony.

Following her one-woman show at Roland, Browse and Delbanco in London in 1963, the year of her tragic early death to cancer, Eric Newton writing in The Guardian eloquently states that "Joan Eardley is surely one of the few artists of today about whom one can honestly say that her heart is the core of her experience and that the nature of her experience is vastly more important to her than the way she paints it. And yet the texture of her paint, the impetuous brushstrokes, the gradations of colour and sudden explosions of dramatic light are exactly what they ought to be. Like Turner, she paints as though the brush were an integral part of her personality. No slickness here, no tricks, no elegance. Just a trial and error attempt to convey the painterly equivalent of what she so intensely wants to convey."