Details

Object type

painting

Title

Catterline Coastguard Cottages

Artist/Maker

Joan Eardley artist

Culture/School

Scottish

Place Associated

Scotland, Aberdeenshire, Catterline (place made)

Date

1951

Materials

oil on canvas

Dimensions

framed: 539 mm x 1029 mm x 87 mm; unframed: 356 mm x 838 mm

Description

In May 1951 Eardley discovered the east coast village of Catterline, near Stonehaven, taken there by fellow painter and art teacher Annette Soper, who had organised an exhibition of Eardley’s work at the Gaumont Cinema in Aberdeen in April 1951. Eardley stayed with the Soper family while hanging and invigilating the exhibition, and then again soon after when she was recuperating from the mumps. This was when she taken to visit Catterline, a favourite picnic spot with the family.

Eardley was immediately drawn to the village’s rocky bay and row of cottages on the cliff overlooking the North Sea. In August 1952 Soper bought the Watch House (‘the Watchie’) and let Eardley stay there whenever she visited from Glasgow. In 1954 Eardley started renting No. 1 South Row, a tiny cottage on the cliff, at the far end from the village that had been used as a store. None of the cottages had any mains electricity or running water. She retained No. 1 as a studio and store for pictures when she moved in 1959 to a cottage known as ‘Sarah’s Cottage’ and then in the same year to No. 18 in the middle of the village. Catterline became Eardley’s principal source of inspiration from around 1955, whether clifftop landscapes, farm fields and haystacks behind the village, back garden beehives, the Makin Green where nets were made and mended, beach scenes with fishing nets drying, the jetty and moored boats or wild seascapes and weather studies.

This early Catterline work is probably her first painting of the village. Painted on canvas, rather than the more sturdy board that she adopted later, Eardley shows the back of the Coastguard Buildings, Station Officer’s house and, on the far right, the Massons’ Inn (the Creel Inn from c.1953), where Eardley stayed in 1952. In front can be seen the Tumley, a green area used to grow vegetables, the communal washhouse and washing line. Interested in the colours and shapes created by the old buildings, the whole is stylised and transformed into a flat decorative pattern. The brilliant blue of the sky, no doubt inspired by the frescoes she had seen in Italy, predominates and sets the tone for the composition. As a subject, the sea is too challenging at this point.

This work was purchased by Glasgow Museums in 1952 from the Arts Council’s important exhibition Eight Young Contemporary British Painters (no. 21), at which Eardley showed alongside Michael Ayrton, R. Henderson Blyth, William Crosbie, John Minton, Robin Philipson, Julian Trevelyan and Keith Vaughan. It was the first Eardley painting to enter a public collection.

Credit Line/Donor

Purchased, 1952

ID Number

2963

Location

In storage