Unexpected Eardley

By Alice Strang, 29.10.2021

Joan Eardley, Little Girl with a Piece, 1959. The Argyll Collection. Ⓒ The Eardley Estate.

As revealed by a search of the Art UK website, works by Joan Eardley can be found in 36 public collections across the United Kingdom. These works and their acquisition stories have been highlighted in a new Art UK curation, ‘From the Highlands to Hampshire: Collecting Joan Eardley’, pulled together by the 36 curators responsible for them and in a specially devised map (though it’s worth checking before arrival that your local Eardley is on display). Many of her works on paper are also in the public realm, but are not yet all on Art UK.

As a result of this project, it was revealed that Eardley’s Little Girl with a Piece (1959) is hanging in Campbeltown Grammar School on the Kintyre Peninsula. It is part of the Argyll Collection, formed between 1960 and 1990 and consisting of 173 works of art. It was established by the author and activist Naomi Mitchison and the art adviser Jim Tyre so young people in Argyll and Bute could experience fine art at first hand, in an area with few museums and galleries.

Little Girl with a Piece is a good example of the work which Eardley made in the Townhead district of Glasgow, where she had a studio from 1952. She was drawn to the vibrancy of the area and its close-knit community and was a regular sight sketching street scenes. The antics of the local children, as they played, squabbled and otherwise passed the time were captured in images executed at speed, some of which were later realised in more fully worked paintings. In this image, a girl is seen absorbed in reading a comic, while holding a ‘piece’ – or sandwich – in her hand. It was acquired for the Argyll Collection in 1964, the year after Eardley’s death.

Regional collections where Eardley is represented include those in Coventry, Kettering, Reading and Rugby. Huddersfield Art Gallery, part of Kirklees Museums & Galleries, is home to her Children and Chalked Wall No. 4 (c.1963). It comes from a celebrated series of paintings in which pairs of children are shown in front of a graffitied wall below the artist’s Townhead studio. The sitters’ comfortable familiarity is clear in their informal pose, while Eardley’s collaging of newsprint onto her board support reflects the freedom of expression and technique of the original graffiti.

Huddersfield’s acquisition was made by Philip James of the Arts Council and Museums Association, from Eardley’s last life-time solo exhibition, held at Roland, Browse & Delbanco in London in 1963. He wrote about it: ‘I have today bought a picture . . . by Joan Eardley. Although the show is only a week old, practically everything has gone – purchases made by the Arts Council, Contemporary Art Society, Birmingham, Nat. Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Kendal, Abbot Hall. I have bought no. 13 in the catalogue. The price was 175 guineas and have got it for 150.’

Meanwhile, in Trinity College at Oxford University, Eardley’s Townhead Close (c.1955) can be found hanging in a tutor’s room. It was purchased by a group of students who formed a subscription art collective in order to purchase modern paintings and prints; acquisitions were duly swapped between their rooms each term. This work was purchased for £26 from St George’s Gallery, London, in 1955, who that year mounted Eardley’s first solo exhibition in the capital. A cluster of young children are depicted within and beside a ‘close’ entrance, the entry to a tenement stairwell. The tilt of the doorframe and the swell of the pavement kerb provide a sense of rhythm to the children’s activities, as they observe and participate in street games. Highlights of red bring attention to bricks and other features of the dilapidated setting, as well as to the structural forms of the children themselves.

The Scottish north-east coast has been transported to the National Trust property of Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire via Eardley’s Catterline in Winter, painted in the early 1960s. It is a stark image of the South Row cottages in Catterline, a fishing village just over 20 miles south of Aberdeen. Eardley first visited it in 1951 and in 1954 rented number 1, the most southerly of the homes in this row, seen on the far left of the image. On the right-hand side, the gable-end of number 12 is visible. The modest houses are dwarfed by their natural surroundings, as two people toil along the path which bisects the bleak landscape. A hint of sunshine at the lower right combines with the luminous blue of the otherwise glowering sky, to relieve the bleakness of this winter scene.

Catterline in Winter is one of three works by Eardley which the artist Derek Hill presented to the National Trust in 1996. This was due to his friendship with Mottisfont’s former owner, the art patron Maud Russell, and to his admiration for Eardley herself. He bought this painting from the Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, in 1964, following its inclusion in the memorial exhibition of her work mounted by the Arts Council Scottish Committee that year.

The Fleming Collection acquired the first of its five works by Eardley in 1968, to hang in the offices of the Robert Fleming & Co bank, in recognition of its founder’s Scottish roots. In 1970, Field of Barley by the Sea, another early 1960s painting, joined its holdings. In this work, Eardley revels in the fecundity of the coastal fields farmed around Catterline. Painted 'en plein air' on a board measuring 107 x 110cm, Eardley uses a range of techniques and perspectives to convey the richness of sensual stimulation provided by her environment. The collection is now owned by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation and the Eardleys are regularly on loan and displayed around the country.

 

Alice Strang is a curator and art historian whose curation of 'From the Highlands to Hampshire: Collecting Joan Eardley' can be viewed on Art UK. This article was first published in Scottish Art News Issue 34.⁠ 

'Joan Eardley: A Centenary of Lives and Landscapes' is on at the Glasgow Women's Library from 28th October until 12th February. For more info on events marking the centenary of Eardley’s birth, check out joaneardley.com and the Scottish Women and the Arts Network.