Financial Times, April, 2016

Joan Eardley, Painter
Scottish 1921-1963

Joan Earldey was born within a decade of Lucian Freud.   Her originality lies in two bodies of work: portraits of Glasgow tenement children, and the winter seascapes of Catterline, the Scottish fishing village where she lived alone in a cliff-top cottage from the mid-1950's.  Eardley's street children are often painted in pastel on fine glass paper, lending sparkle and spontaneity, look powerful in the obdurate sense of self, and vulnerable.