Joan Eardley, R.S.A.

Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh;
The Armstrong Gallery, Glasgow;
Anthony Rampton Esq.

Edinburgh, Aitken Dott & Son, Festival Exhibition, 1964, no. 31;
Edinburgh, The Scottish Arts Council, Joan Eardley Memorial Exhibition, 1964, no. 97
Edinburgh, Talbot Rice Gallery, Joan Eardley Retrospective, 1988, no. 106;
London, Hayward Gallery, Joan Eardley Retrospective, 1988-9, no. 106

The board is sound. The board is slightly undulated. The surface of the work is highly textured but in good original condition, clean and ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals no sign of retouching. Held in a simple wooden frame in fair condition.
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Brass, Hair and Wool is among one of Joan Eardley's most important and final paintings, combining a freedom and visual certainty which derived from her constant study of the environment around Glasgow. The two boys are most likely to be in Rottenrow, an area close to her studio in Townhead which provided the setting for many of her subjects. In this work Eardley made use of collage, stencilled words, scraps of gold, coloured metal foil and newsprint. Graffiti also offered a new means of enlivening her paintings of the street kids. Eardley's use of broken colour, collage and stencilled letters was based on visual reality and as Cordelia Oliver suggests, from 1959 "the paintings based on the Townhead youngsters, accurate as ever in their expression of mood and of interrelationships, began to change their character, the pigment was now applied with a restless urgency that echoes Eardley's struggles with the elements at Catterline" (Cordelia Oliver, Joan Eardley, RSA, 1988, p. 81).  It was during this period that Eardley unearthed a series of metal stencils which she used with relish in this final series of Glasgow paintings. Most of these are of boys with bullet or turnip heads and mischief in their eyes, caricatured one may suggest, but for the saving sympathy, the humorous understanding of their nature and their life that shines through the aggressively applied colours. "Brass, Hair and Wool clearly emblazoned in this manner, gave the title to a study of two truculent lads confabbing against the busy traceries on the scarlet wall." (ibid, p.81) Two other paintings from this last Glasgow series Children and Chalked Wall no 4 and Two Children also employ the sharp-edged letters in a positive dance of singular vivacity above the children's heads.

In those late years Eardley's Glasgow paintings tend to date from the summer months, to judge by the children's tawdry, colourful cottons worn. She was never without a camera and a number of her finished works from this period are closely based on her photographs. Eardley was also regarded to be a social painter and the Glasgow Herald sites in 1954 that "Eardley was concerned with scenes and people of working-class Glasgow, the back streets and tenements in the neighbourhood of her studio, they are social documents literal enough to please the most exacting realist, her portraits of children, a combinations of skill, acute observations and sympathetic truth." Eardley had an immense enthusiasm for the back streets of Glasgow and the children who played here and in an interview in the early 1960s she spoke of  "the community feeling is rapidly disappearing in Glasgow, I do feel that there is still a little bit left. I try still to paint Glasgow so long as there is this family group quality. I've known about half a dozen families well I suppose during the period of time I've worked in Glasgow, some of the children I don't like, most of them I get on with, some interest me much more as characters, these ones I encourage- they don't need much encouragement- they don't pose- they come up and say 'will you paint me?' There are always knocks at the door-the ones I want- I try to get them to stand still- it's not possible to get a child to stay still, I watch them moving about and do the best I can. They (the children) just let out all their life and energy and I just watch them and I do try and think about them in painterly terms, all the bits of red and bits of colour and they wear each other's clothes, never the same thing twice, even that doesn't matter, they are Glasgow- this richness that Glasgow has- I hope it will always have- a living thing, intense quality- you can't ever know what you are going to do but as long as Glasgow has this I'll always want to paint. Whenever, I come back I get a new feeling- chiefly the back streets- I always feel the same- I want to paint them differently- but the same thing- you can't stop observing, things are happening all the time- you are recognizing them in your mind." (Extract from tape recording in the Joan Eardley archive, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) This interview captures the draw that Eardley had with the families and back streets of Glasgow and the extremely close relationships she had with her sitters.

Joan Eardley's life was sadly cut short in 1963 the same year as Brass, Hair and Wool was painted and at the time her contribution to Scottish Art of the 20th century was never questioned. In 2007 the critically acclaimed Joan Eardley exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland and at the Fleming Gallery, London, proved that her contribution to British Art had been recognised on an international stage. "Any lingering doubt about Joan Eardley's stature in British, not just Scottish, art of this century must be finally banished for those who have the good fortune to see her work among some of the great names, from Constable and Samuel Palmer to Matthew Smith, Roger Hilton, Gwen John and many others. She is I believe, one of the greatest British artists of our time" (Cordelia Oliver, Joan Eardley, RSA, 1988, p 109)