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Eardley,  Joan Kathleen Harding  (1921-1963), painter, born on 18 May 1921 on her father's dairy farm near Horsham, Sussex, was the elder of the two daughters of Captain William Edwin Eardley (1887-1929) and Irene Helen Morrison (1891-1991), who had met when he was stationed in Glasgow's Maryhill barracks during the First World War. When Joan was seven her father, who had suffered from gas poisoning, committed suicide, forcing his widow to join her mother at Blackheath, London, where Joan and her sister spent their schooldays. Her talent for drawing was always evident, so that on leaving St Helen's School in Blackheath in 1938 she enrolled at Goldsmiths' College, London. But that course was very soon interrupted when the family moved to Blanefield, near Glasgow, in order to escape the threat of bombing in London. In January 1940 she was accepted for the four-year diploma course in drawing and painting at the Glasgow School of Art, where her good fortune was to be taught by the charismatic but singularly undidactic painter Hugh Adam Crawford. She was a prize-winning front runner at the school during each of her years there, but immediately after gaining her diploma, and throughout 1944, her studies were interrupted by her chosen brand of 'war work', which amounted to camouflaging the hulls of boats at a small local shipyard. It was at that point that her first important work, a painting of some of her workmates which she called The Mixer Men, was hung on the line at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. In 1947, after having attempted to live and work in London for a year, she spent several months at Hospitalfield House, near Arbroath, Angus, then a summer art school for post-diploma students where another influential senior, James Cowie, was warden. After that summer in Arbroath she returned to Glasgow for a session of post-diploma study which, in its turn, led to a year of travel in Italy and France financed by scholarships from the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Scottish Academy.

Among the influences absorbed during Joan Eardley's Glasgow School of Art years were the monumental life drawings of Henry Moore, the intense colour clashes of Andre Derain and the Fauves, and, by no means least, the work of Vincent Van Gogh which Glasgow experienced at first hand in a major exhibition of his work shown at the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum in 1948. It is surely not accidental that Van Gogh's influence, so evident in the drawings which she brought back from France and Italy, coincided with the onset of her creative maturity. In Italy, in particular-where, as well as potent landscape studies, she made numerous drawings of peasants at work in their natural surroundings (Giotto and Masaccio were her declared favourites among the old masters)-it began to be obvious that direct stimulus through the eye was for her a necessary starting point for emotional expression. As her later life was to prove, her affinity with Van Gogh went deeper than the deliberately simple existence of hardships and denials which they had in common. Hers, too, was a lifelong struggle to convey in line and coloured pigments the unusual power of her response to visual and sensual experience. Back at home in Scotland, where she eventually rented a glass-roofed studio in Glasgow's Townhead, this remained her aim, whether she was drawing and painting the surprisingly colourful street life-the dark Victorian tenements, the derelict shop-fronts with their peeling paint, and the cheerful, demonstrative urchins who gathered around her studio-or struggling to express an exceptionally acute response to the power of the North Sea at Catterline, the cliff-top fishing village south of Stonehaven in Kincardineshire. From the mid-1950s she spent the major part of each year at Catterline, and it was there that she sensed deep roots-justifiably so, since her maternal grandfather was a native of Aberdeenshire. Sturdy, with short dark hair and black eyes, she remained essentially a country girl.

All her life Joan Eardley drew incessantly, but more as visual 'feeding' than as the basis for future paintings. Around Catterline, in summer and winter, and even in the wildest storms, she painted on the spot: on the shore, on the cliff-top, and not least in the wonderfully fertile hinterland of summer fields. There, too, some of her best work was done in the chill of midwinter, on the stubblefields bleak with snow against fiery red skies. Increasing illness (a long-neglected breast cancer which eventually killed her) seemed merely to heighten her determination to continue working at full throttle. Her late canvases, not least the large seascapes in which she seems intent on conveying, above all, her sense of oneness with the elements, are among her finest and most moving works. It is interesting that a photograph of Eardley showing her working on a very large canvas on the rocky Catterline foreshore on a wild winter afternoon is eerily reminiscent of a late nineteenth-century camera image of her well-known Scottish predecessor William McTaggart, painting the Atlantic Ocean from the beach at Machrihanish on the Kintyre peninsula.

Joan Eardley had discovered and fallen in love with Catterline at first sight in 1952. She first worked from borrowed lodgings, but after several visits she acquired a primitive studio cottage, 1 The Row, a tiny two-room shack without even running water, at the southernmost end of the village. Eventually, when her paintings began to find buyers in Edinburgh and London, she bought a slightly larger and at least more habitable home at 18 The Row while still retaining the other cottage as a store and a favourite place to set up her easel. However, Glasgow was by no means forsaken: she kept her roof-top studio to the end, returning again and again to re-create on paper or canvas the colourful, raucous, insouciant young life on her doorstep, drawing more and more obviously on abstract expressionist influences-Willem De Kooning in particular. In the Glasgow subjects, as at Catterline even in the wildest seascapes, she never completely 'lost the image', however; with Eardley all influences-Van Gogh, Derain, De Kooning, even at one stage Nicolas de Stael-were swiftly subsumed in her own individual style.

From the autumn of 1948, when her travelling scholarship exhibition was shown at the Glasgow School of Art, Joan Eardley's admirers began to grow in number. Her work became widely known in Scotland and her paintings were regularly hung in the major open Scottish exhibitions as well as in solo shows at Aitken Dott's Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. Never interested or involved in the official business of the art societies, she had none the less been a professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists since 1948 and accepted associateship of the Royal Scottish Academy a few years later. (Full membership in the academy came in 1963, the year of her death.) By the early 1950s she was being invited to exhibit with some of her southern contemporaries in London galleries and before long her work was being seen regularly at Roland Browse and Delbanco. Joan Eardley died too soon for general acceptance as a major British artist; during her short working life her paintings attracted less serious assessment furth of Scotland than they deserved. But it was the art critic Eric Newton of the Manchester Guardian who perceived her quality. After seeing her final London exhibition in 1961, he wrote:

Only in an occasional Goya do I remember the translation of small children into paint mixed so inseparably with warmhearted self-identification with the inner life of the child. And only in Turner's seapaintings does one find oneself so involved with the skies and winds that hang over the uneasy tumult of the waves. (The Guardian, 1 June 1961)

Joan Eardley died, unmarried, on 16 August 1963 in the hospital at Killearn, Stirlingshire; after her cremation the ashes were scattered on the shore at Catterline. Her works are in the Tate collection and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, as well as in several university collections and municipal galleries in a number of British cities, including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Birmingham, and Huddersfield.

Cordelia Oliver 

Sources  personal knowledge (2004) + private information (2004) + W. Buchanan, Joan Eardley, Modern Scottish Painters, 5 (1976) + C. Oliver, Joan Eardley, RSA (1988) + CCI (1963)
Archives NG Scot., papers | NL Scot., corresp. with Audrey Walker FILM Templar Film Studios, 'Maxwell, Eardley, Philipson' [1963]
Likenesses  A. Walker, photographs, priv. coll. [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £19,881 14s. 0d.: confirmation, 11 Oct 1963, NA Scot., SC 5/41/102/21045-8

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