Joan Eardley - Glasgow Street Children

It’s funny the things we remember. For example, I remember being dressed in a cross-country biking helmet, oven gloves and some kind of jacket, then deposited in a pram to be backstop in a Christmas Day game of Cricket when I was in three years old (I should say that we were in New Zealand and strange things like that happen all the time…). I desperately wanted to play, but was judged to be too small and pathetic, so was swathed in ‘protective’ clothing and promptly had a ball hurled at me for several hours - I love my family.

Ah, the game of gentlemen... Or overly enthusiastic children

More pertinent to this thread however, is recalling the day I found Joan Eardley. It was the 27^th of December and I was on my way – via a night in London – to France for New Year. The weather was about as un-Christmas like as could be, namely grey and mild. I was staying with the Architect for the night before flying off for what I hoped would be a relaxing five day break – think Chalet, open fires, snow, good company and way too much alcohol…

A skiing holiday for a non-skier... Picture perfect and totally debauched

Now, for some reason it all gets a little Breakfast at Tiffany’s from here on in, but I’m a sentimental old bird and as such am easily (please!) forgiven for such flights of fancy. High above Old Street, I settled myself on an enormous bed with the fluffiest duvet and pillows known to man and a cup of tea and, quite frankly, lost myself to another world and time. The lowering skies and glassy towers of London slowly disappeared, just as dusk gently wipes away the colour from daylight. The streets below ceased to hum with the life I knew, and were replaced by the hitherto unknown places of Joan Eardley’s Scotland.

A typical example of the Gorbals - bleak, cold, desolate and brimming with inspiration...

This wonderful and utterly unique artist is best known for her depictions of the streets of Glasgow during the 1950’s and 60’s. In coming to know her work, I am deeply conflicted in my feelings towards the images; they are at the same time familiar and alien. I can picture myself there and yet I have absolutely no idea of what that life could be like, except I somehow can instinctively feel the chill wind, the thinness of clothing, the security and warmth of having my brothers and sisters surrounding me... This in essence is why Eardley is brilliant – she’s opens one’s eyes to a new world and makes it as much your home as her subject’s. They always say that if you want to know a man you should walk a mile in his shoes, and that, in pictorial form, is what Eardley has created through her body of Glasgow work.

Children in a Glasgow Back Street, 1959. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.

Any image you can find of Glasgow, and especially the Gorbals, back in the 1950’s is about as bleak as you can get without losing all historical credibility, and yet it was this impoverished and seemingly hopeless environment which Eardley breathed love and warmth and humanity into. Much like one of her heroes Stanley Spencer did, she became a part of the society which she was to capture with her materials over the 20 years of her painterly career. Although their background were poles apart, Eardley felt a kinship with the people of Glasgow, and drew from them the uniting factors of family, friendship and vivacity which make her work accessible to viewers from all walks of life, placing us squarely into her world.

Some of the Samson Family, 1961. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection

Eardley’s gift though is making us, the viewers, do the equivalents of a double take – we look at the image, and then we begin to see the true picture. It is true that the images of her Glasgow children are beautifully constructed in often vivid colour and always with a sense of humour, but there is a darkness which cannot be glossed over. Derelict streets and hungry families still remain even when the sun shines, and whilst Eardley wanted to show that lightness, she was always aware of the cold and bleak nature of her surroundings. Aside from the surroundings in which her paintings are set, there is an extra facets to this shadowy alternate view – the lack of any kind of parental figure. The children are shown as wandering the streets alone or with their siblings; responsibility for the youngest thrust upon the eldest whilst they themselves are nothing but adolescents themselves. The compositions depicts the closeness of these relationships, the family unit at perhaps it most fractured but at its tightest all the same; the bonds between siblings keeping the children warm and safe in the desolation of the adult world. When adults are portrayed it is in a dark and almost dangerous environment of twilight and gritty realism. Her palette is markedly different and whilst the children are full of life and hope born from their nievity, the adults seem more weighed down by trouble and their individual demons.

Three Children at a Tenement Window, 1961. Gouache on Paper. The Eardley Family.

The Table, 1953. Oil on Canvas. The MacLeod Collection

The world Eardley was portraying was a finite one, and the creeping loss of it was something that she was keenly aware of. Her images of the children of the Gorbals have immortalised the place, the time and the characters that she surrounded herself with. Whilst the city may long ago have succumbed to modernisation, its history has been preserved through her work. She took the people to her heart, and over time they have reciprocated in kind. Perhaps the most glowing testament to this love of Eardley by the Scots was the number of people who attended the first major retrospective of her work following her untimely death – over 30,000 people attended in the first three weeks of the exhibition alone. It seems almost poignant that someone who dedicated her artistic life to painting a world which was disappearing was destined to do the same before her time. Those who knew her mourned her passing, and those who have come to know her do so still.

Glasgow Children, 1958. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection