A Painter of Two Worlds
Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley stands as one of Scotland's most beloved and original twentieth-century artists, celebrated for her powerful depictions of two contrasting worlds - the poverty-stricken streets of Glasgow's Townhead and the wild, windswept coastline of Catterline in Aberdeenshire. Her career, though tragically brief, produced a body of work that continues to resonate with audiences across generations, capturing the raw energy of urban childhood and the elemental forces of nature with equal intensity.
Born on 18 May 1921 at Bailing Hill Farm in Warnham, Sussex, Joan came into a world still recovering from the First World War. Her father, Captain William Edwin Eardley, had served in the trenches and suffered the lasting effects of a gas attack. Her mother, Irene Helen Morrison, was Scottish, having met William when he was stationed in Glasgow during the war. The family's early years as dairy farmers in Sussex were marked by her father's declining health, both physical and mental, following his wartime trauma.
Tragedy and New Beginnings
In 1929, when Joan was just eight years old, her father took his own life. The full circumstances of his death were kept from Joan and her younger sister Pat until they reached their teenage years. Following this tragedy, the family moved to Blackheath in London, where an aunt generously paid for the sisters' education at St Helen's School. It was here that Joan's artistic talent first began to emerge, recognised by her teachers as something special.
Joan's formal art education began at the local art school in Blackheath, where she studied for two terms. In 1938, she enrolled at Goldsmiths College for one term before the shadow of another world war fell across Europe. In 1939, seeking safety from the expected bombing of London, Joan, her mother, and her sister moved to Scotland to live with relatives in Auchterarder, and then more permanently in Bearsden, near Glasgow. This move would prove pivotal, reconnecting Joan with her Scottish roots and setting the stage for her artistic career.
Glasgow School of Art and Early Development
In January 1940, Joan enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art as a day student, studying under Hugh Adam Crawford, a skilled portrait painter who would later recognise her as one of the most outstanding artists to pass through his tutelage. At the art school, Joan was influenced by the Scottish Colourists and met the Polish artist Josef Herman, who arrived in Glasgow in 1940 and whose work left a lasting impression on her developing style. More importantly, she met Margot Sandeman, who became a close and lifelong friend. The two women would often paint together, sharing family holidays and camping trips, including summers on the Isle of Arran where they used an outhouse known as "The Tabernacle" as their studio.
By 1943, Joan had completed her diploma in drawing and painting. Her diploma self-portrait, an informal yet technically accomplished work, won her the Sir James Guthrie Prize for portraiture. Hugh Adam Crawford was so impressed that he purchased the painting to hang in his own home, later including it in one of his own self-portrait compositions. This work remains her only extant example of formal portraiture, a precursor to the more immediate, spontaneous style that would define her mature work.
After graduating, Joan briefly trained as a teacher at Jordanhill Teacher Training College, but classroom teaching did not suit her temperament. She left after one term and instead worked as a joiner's apprentice with a small boat-building firm in Bearsden throughout 1944. This practical work, which included painting camouflage patterns on landing craft for the war effort, allowed her to continue attending evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art until 1946.
The Italian Sojourn
In 1948, the Royal Scottish Academy awarded Joan a Carnegie scholarship, which, combined with a travelling scholarship from the Glasgow School of Art, enabled her to spend several months in Italy and briefly in Paris. This journey proved formative, exposing her to the great works of the Italian Renaissance. In September 1948, she travelled by boat and train to Florence, where she immersed herself in the work of Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca. She was drawn to the humanity and sculptural qualities of these masters, values that would echo throughout her own work.
In November 1948, Joan travelled to Forte dei Marmi, where she painted fishermen working on their nets - a subject she would return to years later in Catterline. She spent Christmas 1948 in Paris before moving on to Venice in January 1949. There she fell ill and had to seek treatment from an English-speaking doctor in Florence. Among the works she created during this period was a striking painting of beggars gathered at the Scuola Grande di San Marco in Venice, portraying them with tenderness and sympathy - qualities that would later define her depictions of Glasgow's street children.
Upon her return to Scotland in 1949, Joan mounted what was effectively her first solo exhibition at the Mackintosh Gallery of the Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition showcased her Italian work, including striking scenes of peasants, beggars, children, and elderly women. The show met with considerable praise, with several works acquired by Aberdeen Art Gallery and the Glasgow School of Art's own collection.
Townhead - The Glasgow Years
In 1949, Joan established a studio in Glasgow's Townhead area, one of the city's most deprived and overcrowded districts. Her first studio was on the fourth floor of a tenement building in Cochrane Street. She later moved to a space above a scrap metal store on St James Road when her original studio was lost to urban regeneration - a change she regretted, noting it had been "so easy to get the slum children to come up." Her studio became her world - a small room packed with art materials, a narrow bed, a stove, and little else. She lived simply, dedicating herself entirely to her art.
The children of Townhead became Joan's primary subject matter during the 1950s. These were the poorest children in Glasgow, often playing in the streets in ragged clothes, the older girls looking after younger siblings. The area was marked by poverty, overcrowding, and buildings damaged by wartime bombing, all earmarked for eventual demolition. Yet Joan saw beyond the deprivation to the vibrancy, friendliness, and community spirit of the backstreets. "I like the friendliness of the back streets," she explained. "Life is at its most uninhibited here. Dilapidation is often more interesting to a painter as is anything that has been used and lived with."
Joan became a familiar sight in the streets of Townhead, often transporting her easel and paints around Glasgow in an old pram. She was rarely without her camera, using photographs alongside life drawings to capture the raw energy of the children. The twelve children of the Samson family, who lived nearby, became her favourite models. Ann Samson later recalled: "To get to her studio you went up a spiral stair. She gave us paper to draw and toys to keep us quiet. 'Sit in peace' she'd say as she was drawing us. We used to get 3d off Joan for posing for her and went to Miss Bickett's to buy sweets."
Joan's paintings of Glasgow children were praised for their honest portrayal of working-class life, yet they radiated with youthful energy and vitality rather than despair. She developed a unique style that combined acute observation with warm human sympathy, capturing the exuberance and awkwardness of childhood without sentimentality. Her work was concurrent with that of childhood folklorists Peter and Iona Opie, who were documenting children's rhymes and customs - all recognising that this poverty-stricken tenement life was a vanishing world.
In the later years of her Glasgow period, Joan began incorporating collage elements into her paintings - foil sweet wrappers, scraps of newspaper, and stencilled letters that evoked the urban environment. Works like "Two Children" (1963) featured these mixed-media elements, with the worn lettering of boarded-up shop fronts and references to local businesses such as the metal scrap store near her studio.
Discovery of Catterline
In the spring of 1950, while convalescing from mumps in Aberdeen, Joan was taken for a drive along the coast by her friend Annette Soper. They stopped at the churchyard in Catterline, where they encountered a gravedigger who cheerfully explained he had just discovered he was digging up the wrong grave. Children were playing nearby, and one boy had stuck a human skull on a pole. Joan was entranced. "This is the real Shakespeare stuff," she declared. "What a place to live." And this was before she had even seen the village itself - the clifftop cottages, the rocks, the fishing boats, and the sea far below.
From that moment, Catterline became Joan's second home. She initially worked from the Watch House, a former coastguard property that Annette Soper had purchased and allowed Joan to use freely. In 1955, Joan bought her own cottage at Number 1, The Row - the most southerly cottage in the village, perched on the cliff edge. It was even more primitive than her Townhead studio, without electricity, running water, or sanitation. In 1959, she acquired Number 18, The Row, which was in better condition and faced the sea, while keeping Number 1 as her picture store. She called it "a great wee house. I am sitting looking out at the darkness and the sea. I think I shall paint here. This is a strange place - it always excited me."
The small fishing community of Catterline initially watched this newcomer with interest, but they quickly came to respect her work ethic and genuine character. As one neighbour, Ruby Coull, later wrote: "She lived so quietly among us and was accepted as one of us." The villagers, mainly fishermen and their families, recognised in Joan someone who was not afraid of hard work, who would hammer a plywood panel onto the roof when the wind blew, and who shared their resilience in the face of harsh conditions.
The Catterline Landscapes
In her first years at Catterline, Joan concentrated on painting the surrounding fields and cottages rather than the sea itself, despite being just yards from it. Her early Catterline paintings were strikingly similar in style and colour to her Townhead works, with orange and blue predominating. It was only from the mid-1950s that she began to tackle the sea and the beach where salmon nets were hung out to dry and mend.
Joan painted the fields around Catterline through the changing seasons with a seriality reminiscent of Claude Monet. Her lyrical paintings incorporated real grasses and vegetation into the paint surface - "Seeded Grasses and Daisies, September" (1960) combined collaged elements of actual grasses and daisies against a sombre sky, while "Harvest" (1960-61) included elements of grit. "Catterline in Winter" (1963) became one of her best-loved works, portraying the fields and cottages under a leaden winter sky.
When Joan turned her attention to seascapes, her work grew larger and more imposing in response to the huge expanses of sea and sky. She was particularly attracted to wild seas and stormy weather. When she heard reports of approaching gales, she would travel by train from Glasgow to Stonehaven, then ride her Lambretta scooter to Catterline to paint. "The Wave" from February 1961, described as her breakthrough work, was painted entirely in the open air during a particular storm. She created four paintings during that storm, with the state of the tides determining which she would work on at any given time.
For her seascapes, Joan switched from canvas to large hardboard panels, some as large as six feet in length, providing a more rigid surface to work on. She usually worked outdoors, often in poor weather - snowstorms, gale-force winds, and driving rain. Her expressive handling of paint and her experiments with texture, incorporating boat paint mixed with newspaper, sand, and grasses, gave her seascapes an almost abstract quality. Art critic Murdo Macdonald observed that "she committed herself to understanding the sea more than any other painter since William McTaggart in the 1890s. Rather than just responding to the attraction of the coastline, she painted with the perception of a mariner aware that waves are heavy, fast-moving lumps of water, as able to kill as to support."
Recognition and the Catterline School
By the mid-1950s, Joan's reputation was growing steadily. She was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1955 at the age of 34, making her one of the youngest artists ever to receive this honour. That same year, she had her first solo exhibition in London at St George's Gallery in Cork Street. In 1954, she had been invited to participate in "Six Young Painters" at Parsons Gallery in London, and critics praised her work's remarkable quality and emotional depth.
Joan became the focal point of what came to be known as the "Catterline School" - a group of artists increasingly drawn to the village during the 1950s, including Annette Soper, Angus Neil, and Lil Neilson. While never a formal school, these artists were attracted to the dramatic landscape and the community that Joan had helped to establish.
The Final Years
In February 1963, Joan was elected a full Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy - a peer-led honour recognising artists of exceptional merit. She was at the height of her artistic powers, working with an intensity that seemed almost driven by premonition. In March, she entered a frenzied period of painting at Catterline. By April, she was gravely ill.
On 18 May 1963 - her 42nd birthday - Joan wrote to her friend Lil Neilson that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite her illness, she managed to attend the opening of her solo exhibition at the prestigious Cork Street gallery Roland, Browse & Delbanco in London that May. Back in Catterline, suffering from unbearable headaches and double vision, she was forced to rest between courses of radium treatment at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. By July, the cancer had spread to her brain. Nursed by friends, she spent her final days sitting in her cottage with a red spotted handkerchief over her eyes to shield them from the bright summer light.
Joan Eardley died on 16 August 1963 at Killearn, near Glasgow, at the age of just 42. Her ashes were scattered on the beach at Catterline, the place that had brought her so much inspiration and peace. She left one of her last paintings, "Two Children" (1963), unfinished on her easel in her Glasgow studio.
Legacy and Recognition
In January 1964, just five months after her death, the Joan Eardley Memorial Exhibition opened at Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum at Kelvingrove before being shown at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. The exhibition was hugely successful, cementing her reputation as one of Scotland's most important twentieth-century artists. A major retrospective was held at the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh from 2007 to 2008, examining Eardley's work in both a national and international context.
In 2017, Historic Environment Scotland awarded a commemorative plaque at Number 1 South Row, Catterline. The cottage remains a place of pilgrimage for those who admire Joan's deep engagement with the landscape and community. The village itself has changed little since the 1950s, allowing visitors to stand in the places where she painted and experience the views they recognise from her canvases.
Joan's work is held in major collections worldwide, including the National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow Museums, Aberdeen Art Gallery, and the Hunterian at the University of Glasgow. Her paintings continue to command significant prices at auction, with "The Yellow Jumper" (1963), one of her last finished paintings of Glasgow's street children, selling for over £200,000 in recent years.
Art historians have increasingly recognised Joan Eardley's international significance. Dr Janet McKenzie of the National Galleries of Scotland has noted that "her work deserves to be compared to Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg, Lucian Freud." Her biographer Cordelia Oliver observed that "for her a truly successful painting had to go deeper than a mere visual record, no matter how accurate. Her success lay in her ability to combine the acute, uncompromising painter's eye with a warm human sympathy and understanding."
What makes Joan Eardley's work enduringly powerful is its honesty and immediacy. Whether depicting the street children of Glasgow or the wild seas of Catterline, she painted with raw emotion and technical brilliance, never compromising her vision or choosing the easy path. She created a unique visual language that captured the essence of her subjects - their energy, their vulnerability, their resilience - with a directness that continues to connect with viewers today. Almost six decades after her death, Joan Eardley remains one of Scotland's most beloved artists, her work a testament to the transformative power of seeing the extraordinary in the everyday.
