Margot Sandeman: A New Fleming Collection Acquisition

By Greg Thomas, 16.12.2021

Margot Sandeman, Two Painters in a Landscape (Margot & Joan), 1960. The Fleming Collection. Ⓒ The Artist's Estate .

Margot Sandeman’s biography is entwined with those of two of Scotland’s most famous late 20th-century artists: Joan Eardley and Ian Hamilton Finlay. But she often appears as a buoying or grounding presence, not always recognised for her own precocious artistic talent. Greg Thomas discusses her career, as the Fleming Collection announces two new acquisitions, purchased from the artist’s estate through Jill Gerber of Gerber Fine Art

Unveiled in April 2021, the Arran Arts Heritage Trail includes 20 waymarkers scattered across the island. The seventh stone, in the small village of Corrie, bears two names – ‘Eardley : Sandeman’ – which tell the story of a deep and loving friendship. Margot Sandeman was born in 1922 to a family of artistic and cultural distinction. Her mother Muriel Boyd was a renowned needlework artist while her father Archibald Sandeman was a chemist and self-taught watercolourist. Margot grew up in a house in the Arts and Crafts style in the leafy Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, while Arran was a regular holiday destination.

At the end of the 1930s, the aspiring painter followed in her mother’s footsteps to Glasgow School of Art, where in 1940 she crossed paths with a new student, another resident of Bearsden, later remembered by her friends as prone to depression yet deeply compassionate. In a 2007 interview, Sandeman recalled that she and Joan Eardley ‘were very shy of each other for about a year’, but eventually became ‘tremendously great friends’. A few years later, Sandeman would meet a similarly brooding classmate, Ian Hamilton Finlay, recalled by literary critic Derek Stanford, who met him in 1946, as ‘fair-haired’, ‘faunlike’, and ‘a little pitiful’. He had a steely edge though, and was expelled from GSA for organising a student strike, returning for a period to work as a janitor.

Sandeman’s artistic fortunes would become closely interwoven with those of her two more tempestuous peers. The first step on this road was an invitation extended by her parents for Eardley to join the Sandemans on their annual trip to Arran, where Joan and Margot’s friendship deepened. The two made many more pilgrimages to the island across the remainder of the 1940s and the 1950s, sometimes renting a tiny bothy known as the Tabernacle in Corrie village (below the spot on High Corrie where Muriel’s friends Jessie M King and EA Taylor had run a summer school during the 1920s and 30s). 

In Heroica Theatre’s 2017 production Joan Eardley: A Private View, Sandeman is presented as the sunny backdrop to Joan’s self-doubt and angst. It is easy to read such distinctions into the styles the two were developing at this time. According to GSA exhibitions director Jenny Brownrigg, while Eardley’s Woman in High Backed Wicker Chair (1949), a portrait study made in the Tabernacle, depicts the figurative detail of the bothy interior, Sandeman’s works on the same subject make bolder play with colour and backdrop. Eardley’s paintings would come to be celebrated for their extraordinarily raw emotional energy and social conscience, seen as great works of modern art. Sandeman’s, with their bright cloisonniste colour-blocks and clarity of outline, their easier affinity with a representative approach, are often described as poetic, lyrical. It is tempting to see them as the products of a more contented soul. 

In any case, it is clear that Sandeman was a source of emotional succour and creative inspiration to Eardley. In that 2007 interview, Margot even recalled that it was a drawing of hers from the 1940s, of two children playing marbles on the pavement, that ‘set off Joan on that theme’—Eardley’s tender portraits of Glasgow street children are now among her best-loved works. But their friendship, ‘the most important of Eardley’s life’ according to curator Fiona Pearson, was cut short by Eardley’s early death from breast cancer in 1963.

Sandeman was, at this time, on the cusp of the second great artistic partnership of her life. By the following year, Ian Hamilton Finlay had invited her to lay out and illustrate the 15th issue of his poetry magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. Finlay seems to have valued Sandeman particularly as a sketcher; her fluid, dextrous pencil illustrations for the issue, published in 1965, are exemplified by her front cover, a jazzy cross-hatched seascape featuring the cascading words ‘boats / shores / tides / fish’. Across the following page, her collages of marine scenes offset poems by George Mackay Brown, Edwin Morgan and others.

Sandeman’s illustrations would become a vital component of several of Finlay’s most ambitious publishing projects across the next few years, including the concertina booklets Fishing News, News and Rhymes for Lemons (both 1970), the folding card Arcadian Sundials (1970), and the postcard poem 3 Names of Barges (1969). Finlay’s long-time critic and friend Stephen Bann suggests that ‘around this important period, Sandeman was among the very few artists who must have spurred Ian on to new ways of envisaging the medium of the card’. Later, artist and poet worked together on a full booklet of poems and artworks, Peterhead Fragments (1979), and on the collaborative exhibition Sheaf (1986).

Just as Sandeman is seen as having provided emotional ballast to Eardley, her creativity is often encountered as auxiliary to Finlay’s mercurial vision. As several recent solo shows have indicated, however, Sandeman was herself an artist of singular gifts, whose landscapes combine a Matisse-like effervescence and colour palette with something of the visionary quality of Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham period (yet tied to a very different natural scene). The benign magic of her paintings continued to be conjured frequently on Arran – where she acquired a family home – and her estate remains a source of riches and intrigue, as new sketches and paintings are released by her children. At some point in the near future, Sandeman’s legacy might be rewarded with a show on a scale to match those offered to her friends, drawing her out from the shadow of Joan Eardley and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Margot Sandeman's 'Twine (with Ian Hamilton Finlay)', 1988, and 'Two Painters in a Landscape (Margot and Joan)', 1960, are now part of the Fleming Collection. They will be displayed in exhibitions as part of our museum-without-walls strategy next year. This article was first published in Scottish Art News Issue 34.