Joan Eardley

Joan Eardley was a Scottish painter celebrated for her raw, emotionally charged depictions of Glasgow's impoverished Townhead district and the dramatic coastal landscapes of Catterline, a small fishing village on the northeast coast of Scotland. Her gritty portrayals of street children, rendered with thick impasto and collaged elements such as newspaper scraps, established her as a uniquely empathetic social realist, while her later seascapes, painted directly in fierce wind and rain, pushed toward an almost abstract expressionist intensity. Though she died prematurely of cancer in 1963 at age 42, her work is now held in major Scottish collections including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and she is widely regarded as one of the most significant Scottish artists of the twentieth century.