Strength and Sentiment: Early Eardley

By Greg Thomas, 12.12.2023

Covered Market, Glasgow (circa 1945-49) Joan Eardley NMC/0087 In the collection of The Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections © Estate of Joan Eardley. All Rights Reserved, DACS 202

One of the vitrines included in Early Eardley: Selected Works 1940-1950, showing until 16^th December at Glasgow’s Reid Gallery, contains a progress report written by Joan Eardley during a travelling scholarship to France and Italy in 1948-49. Recalling the various cities she has visited – Venice, Sienna, Florence – the artist extolls the glory of Brunelleschi et al. But her most purple prose is reserved for the “smaller details of Venice. A gondola against a red colour-washed palace – the green water – the little white & pink hump backed bridges..., a pink wall varying into enumerable [sic.] warmths and coolnesses.” She also notes that she “stayed 3 weeks in Assisi,” which she had initially visited to see the church of San Francesco, in order to observe “the white oxen, & paniered [sic.] donkeys & the barefooted peasants...”

Her descriptions suggest the strength of Eardley’s naturalistic impulses, a fascination with the physical, sensory, and emotional reality of everyday life borne out in several pieces from that trip included in the current exhibition. Historical and architectural spectacle were ultimately of less interest than the colour wash on a peeling wall, the rhythms of working life in a small agricultural community. In Eardley’s famous canvases of the 1950s-60s, these tendencies come brilliantly packaged in a chunky expressionist facture and vibrant colour palette (not to mention an almost art-brut rawness and tachiste scratchiness at times). But in the pieces currently showing in the Reid Gallery, the underlying impulses remain more to the fore.

The exhibition is divided into thematic-chronological sections with unfussy intelligence. An anterior room contains letters and ephemera from Eardley’s student days at GSA (1940-43), while on a nearby wall projects the short film ‘Tabernacle’, depicting the Sussex-born painter’s sojourns on Arran with Margot Sandeman. Entering the gallery proper, we find several early life drawings. Thick-set, male or masculine forms hang in intriguing counterpoint to one of the standout pieces, an openly sensual portrait of a lissom, reclining female in unbuttoned red waistcoat. A sliver of torso stretches out beneath subtly animated sleeping features of the kind Eardley excelled in capturing.

In 1946, the young artist was commissioned to paint a school mural in Lincolnshire. A wall of luminous chalk and pastel showing fields and farm wagons records her time in the rural county (surely reminiscent of that she grew up in). These pieces form part of a large central section of scene paintings and sketches both rural and urban. The imposing thickness of outline and proclivity for squat, physically weighty forms (cows and oxen, carts and boats) would be carried through into Eardley’s later style. In two versions of ‘Covered Market, Glasgow’ (ca. 1945-49), the picking out of commercial signage adumbrates the incorporation of text into iconic late pieces. But there is an easier affinity with traditional, en-plein-air realism here (as in ‘Man Tending Drying Nets’ [1948]), suggesting an aptitude with which Eardley anchored herself when executing her later, daringly abstract works. A final room includes figure studies and a stirring seascape (‘The Shore, Corrie, Arran’ [ca. 1943-47]) whose dense tangle of hedgerows hints at the majestic violence the artist would bring to this genre.

In various places in this show, pen-and-ink sketches are positioned next to ‘final’ works, showing the artist’s adjustment of angles, shading, etcetera from one iteration to the next. The points of continuity and difference form a nice analogy for the wider journey alluded to: from the naturalism, sensuality, and latent strength of early Eardley to the great, tender, aggressive works of her maturity.

Early Eardley: Selected Works 1940-1950 is exhibited at Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery until 16^th December