Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley was born at Warnham, Sussex on 18 May 1921. Her parents were Anglo-Scottish dairy farmers. Her father served in the Great War as a captain in the army and was badly wounded in a gas attack. He committed suicide in 1929. Joan moved with her mother to Blackheath in London, where she studied at Goldsmiths’ College of Art at New Cross, (1938-39), then at the Glasgow School of Art under Hugh Adam Crawford. It has been suggested that Crawford helped to shape her preference for subjects drawn from everyday experience, but her approach was more earthy and sensuous than his. She graduated with several prizes and in 1947 spent six months under James Cowie at the Patrick Allen-Fraser School of Art, Hospitalfield. In 1948 she took up a post-diploma scholarship at the Glasgow School of Art. In that city she met Josef Herman, who had just fled from Nazi-occupied Europe, and saw her fellow students copy the works of Pablo Picasso and Jankel Adler. Henry Moore was also a strong influence at that time. She spent 1947 touring France and Italy, and even at that stage, her carefully observed drawings of Italian peasants show her concern for the poor and marginalised of society. Upon her return to Scotland, she took a dilapidated attic-studio close to the slums in the Townhead district of the city.  The street children of that district had an impact on her and she became well-known for her paintings which concentrated on street life, young children and the elderly. Her work was raw, utterly authentic and without sentimentality. She soon developed a reputation for atmospheric and realistic urban settings which fitted perfectly into the austere world of post-war Britain. Typical of her work from that time was her Street Kids (1949-51; Edinburgh, National Gallery of Modern Art). She was a familiar sight wheeling her easel and paints around Glasgow in an old pram. In 1951 she moved to the fishing village of Catterline, Kinkardineshire, about 20 miles south of Aberdeen on Scotland’s north-east coast, where she worked outdoors in all weathers, painting marine and landscape scenes in many different moods, sometimes incorporating real pieces of grass in the paint. Weighing her boards down with stones, she produced dramatic seascapes of wild winter seas, painted out of doors on the shore or cliff top of Catterline, a small east coast fishing village south of Aberdeen. Eardley loved the ever changing light and weather of the rugged coastline and although many of these large paintings are of the same view, they each capture the different mood of a bright evening sunset or a dark approaching storm. When the locals warned that a storm was on the way, she would get on her motor scooter and paint magnificent scenes. She also portrayed the changing seasons in the fields around the village in heavily layered and textured paint even incorporating real flower heads into her surfaces. She became the focus of the ‘Catterline School’ of artists, a group who were increasingly drawn to the village during the 1950s and who included Annette Soper, Angus Neil and Lil Neilson. Among some of her finest and most powerful works are fierce and bold evocations of the wind and the weather. Notable is Catterline in Winter (1963; Edinburgh, National Gallery of Modern Art.). Of her seascapes, she said: ‘When I’m painting in the north-east, I hardly ever move out of the village. I hardly move from one spot. I find the more I know the place, the more I know the particular spot… the more you can get out of it, the more it gives you…’ Eardley was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1955 and a full Academician in 1963. She died from breast cancer at the age of 42 on 16 August 1963. Her ashes were scattered on the beach at Catterline.  Her Salmon Net Posts (1962) may be found in the collection of the Tate in London and number of other works in the British Government Art Collection. Her oil and collage on canvas Two Children may be found on the ground floor of Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. In 1988 a major retrospective exhibition of her work was held at Talbot Rice Centre and RSA, Edinburgh. That same year, Mainstream Publishing produced Joan Eardley, R.S.A. written by Cordelia Oliver, offering a considered appreciation of her life and work. In 2007 the Eardley family founded the company Eardley Editions to promote her work and provide reproduction prints. In 2008 it was reported that a collector had discovered a hitherto unsuspected Eardley painting hidden behind one of her framed sketches. In April 2009 Eardley’s Brass, Hair and Wool (1963), a painting of two boys standing against the red wall of a Glasgow tenement, appeared in a saleroom in London. Andre Zlattinger, head of Scottish pictures at Sotheby’s said: ‘This is a very important painting, Eardley’s first major mixed medium work to appear on the market. It’s very, very hard to get hold of Joan Eardleys. Either they are in public collections or in the collections with owners who love them so much they hardly ever go on the market. This work encapsulates all that Eardley was trying to do. She loved the rawness of Glasgow.’