Joan Eardley, R.S.A.

The artist's estate

The canvas is original. On close inspection there is some light craquelure in places. There is some very light surface dirt to the work. Otherwise in good original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no sign of retouching. Held in a simple black painted frame in fair condition.
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Joan Eardley first visited Corrie with Margot Sandeman during the summer of 1942. As she did in Catterline throughout the 1950s and early 60s, Eardley tended to paint her seascapes either from sea level or from the cliff-top looking dramatically out across the rocky shoreline towards the sea 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. It was the sheer physical closeness to nature and its inherent elemental energy which Eardley found so fitting at Corrie and Catterline alike. The result was a body of work that possessed an acute sense of truth and urgency which is extremely rare. The present work can be seen as an important precursor to the landscapes she painted a decade later for which she became so well known.

As Cordelia Oliver highlights, "Joan was occasionally alone at Corrie. In a letter to Margot Sandeman, written early in the autumn of 1944, she gives a vivid verbal picture, as she often did in letters to her few intimates, of the changing mood of the countryside and how it affected her. Despite the 'ghastly, ghastly weather' which was making painting difficult out of doors, she was enthralled by the colours of the trees in which Arran abounds. 'Quite suddenly...they have all turned properly – into the most tremendous colours I have ever seen. The oak trees have gone back into the kind of brownish, yellowish colour that they were in the spring, and others are almost pink. And others, because they haven't turned I suppose, look quite blue beside them. It's impossible to say in words – the bracken is red, not orange as it was, but dark red, and some of the trees have lost their leaves almost altogether and look sometimes very pale and sometimes very black beside all the other colour. The ghastly part is, how can it ever be painted?' Even at that early date, Eardley was prepared to battle it out with the elements when it came to the matter of finishing a painting. 'The picture I painted yesterday was of a fir tree in the castle wood from the shore part of the Brodick road. I tried hard to finish it – but I haven't, quite. About 11 o'clock, deluges of rain came on and I felt absolutely fed up, and then I suddenly thought that I wasn't going to be beaten by the blasted rain again. So I erected a little tent over my canvas with my mac and your bike and some pieces of rope...it must have looked pretty funny to the people from the road...today it is raining, too, only this time there is a hurricane as well, and I don't think the little tent would stay up.'"

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."