JOAN EARDLEY R.S.A. (SCOTTISH 1921-1963) §
FISHING NETS, CATTERLINE
Estimate: £30,000 - £50,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 112- 206 | Thursday 05 June from 6pm
Description
With the Artist's Estate number EE125 inscribed verso, oil on board
Dimensions
98cm x 168cm (38.5in x 66.25in)
Provenance
Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London
Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow
The Collection of Gillian Raffles
Exhibited:
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Joan Eardley - A Sense of Place, 3 December 2016 - 25 May 2017, no.84
Literature:
Christopher Andreae, Joan Eardley 2013, Lund Humphries, Farnahm, p. 77, illus.col. pl.68
Footnote
Fishing Nets, Catterline is believed to date to c.1962. It features in the Youtube video released on 1 December 2016 by the National Galleries of Scotland to accompany their Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place exhibition and its associated publication.
It was a pivotal friendship that led Eardley to the discovery of Catterline in Aberdeenshire. Her friend Annette Soper, a local teacher and artist in the Stonehaven area, was hosting Eardley whilst she convalesced from the mumps. On a drive down the coast, the pair stumbled across the tiny fishing village. Shortly after, Soper would go on to purchase the Watch House, a cottage set apart from the rest of the village on the clifftop, as a place for her and Eardley to paint. From 1952 she gave Eardley free rein to use the cottage, which Eardley duly did, dividing her time between Catterline and Glasgow thereafter. In 1955 she purchased No.1 South Row herself, which she renovated with the assistance of Angus Neil. This marked the beginning of a significant shift in her artwork in what would tragically be the final decade of her life.
‘In order to get an idea of how Eardley responded to the landscape one has to remember that Hugh Adam Crawford (at The Glasgow School of Art) had taught his students to feel their painting in their bodies,’ explains curator Fiona Pearson in the exhibition catalogue for her 2007 retrospective of Eardley at the National Galleries of Scotland. ‘In response to the huge expanses of sea and sky, Eardley’s works become physically larger and more imposing.’ The monumental oil represented here, Fishing Nets, Catterline, attests to this.
Painted c.1962, Eardley’s later oils have an almost semi-abstract quality. This work is divided by the compositional ‘rule of thirds’, with the grey sky looming densely over the ragged twists of netting, which are staked into the muddy ground of the foreshore. The palette is exaggeratedly earthy and the brushwork expressive and highly gestural. The tenacious Eardley gave up doing battle with the elements, instead choosing to immerse herself within them; weighting her canvases down with rocks and tying herself to the easel, allowing the storms to do their worst as she scraped with her palette knife and dribbled paint with the wet end of her brush. This extraordinary visual image of Eardley - quite literally in her element - becomes intrinsically linked with one’s appreciation of her Catterline oils.