Description
Signed and dated '53, oil on canvas
Dimensions
61cm x 91cm (24in x 36in)
Footnote
Provenance:Parsons Gallery, Six Young Painters, 1954 where purchased by Eric Linklater and thence by descent
Exhibited:Arts Council of Gt. Britain, Joan Eardley 1964, no.27
Scottish Arts Council, Third Eye Centre, Innaugral Exhibition, May 1975, no.36
Piers Art Centre, Stromness, 1980
Talbot Rice Gallery, Joan Eardley Retrospective, 1988, no.42
Literature: Cordelia Oliver, Joan Eardley 1988, Illustrated p.53 :-'Joan Eardley's friendship with Angus Neil was also resumed and, for a time, he became her most important model, posing for a handful of paintings which must be considered amongst the finest works of the middle Glasgow period.......In The Table (1953) he(Angus Neil) is a more fully realised figure sitting at a kitchen-table covered with crockery, against a high-set window of which only the lower part is seen. All this is set down in a marvellously lucid and telling arrangement of colour-planes, rendering with inspired simplicity the fall of the light from the dusty window ( you can tell from the yellowish nature of the light that this is a long-unwashed pane of glass) across the cluttered tabletop and across the darker face and jacket of the sitter, Looking one is reminded once again of the importance laid by Joan Eardley on what she called the "the story" behind her human subjects; for her a truly successful painting had to go deeper than a mere visual record, no matter how accurate. As with other paintings of this protege of hers and certainly in the best of her later studies of the Samson family in Townhead, her success lay in her ability to combine the acute, uncompromising painter's eye with a warm human sympathy and understanding.'