Joan Eardley
Painted Glasgow tenement children and the North Sea at Catterline, and died at forty-two.
Joan Eardley was born in Sussex in 1921 and moved to Scotland as a child, training at Glasgow School of Art. Two subjects divide the work almost equally. In a Townhead studio she drew and painted the children of the Samson family and their neighbours, ragged and unposed against graffiti and tenement walls, with newsprint and sweet papers sometimes collaged into the surface. At Catterline, a fishing village on the Kincardineshire coast, she painted the sea and the fields in heavy weather, working outdoors with the board pegged down. She was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy and died of breast cancer in 1963, at forty-two.
The career was short and the surviving body of work is correspondingly finite, which is the single most important fact about the market. A great deal of what appears is on paper or on board rather than canvas — pastels, gouaches, oil sketches, and the working drawings of the Glasgow children, which are numerous. Collaged elements in the Townhead pictures are original and are sometimes lifting; they should not be flattened or reattached casually. Much is unsigned, since the work stayed in the studio, so provenance and the Eardley estate records do the identifying.
If you own a work by Joan Eardley
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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