§ JOAN EARDLEY R.S.A. (SCOTTISH 1921-1963) HAYSTACK AND GATE With the Artist's Estate Inventory Number EE239 verso, oil on board (19cm x 23cm (7.5in x 9in)) Exhibited: Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow, March 1985, no.15 Note: Eardley’s first visited Catterline in 1951 and the village became a new stimulus where she could depict the immensities of nature in the open air, painting and sketching 'on the spot' in all seasons, weather conditions and times of day. As Patrick Elliott has explained Catterline was not a picturesque Highland village…but a working harbour with boats, fishing nets and fields of wheat, barley and oats. People may be absent from Eardley’s Catterline paintings, but their presence is felt.’ (Patrick Elliott and Anne Galastro, Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place, Edinburgh 2016, p.10) Eardley made frequent painting trips to Catterline between 1952 and 1954, before renting the small cottage at No. 1 South Row. She thereafter split her time between Glasgow and the village. Whilst keeping No.1 as a store, Eardley went on to purchase No. 18 South Row in 1959. Her relationship with the immediate area deepened and in 1961 Eardley declared: When I’m painting in the north-east I hardly ever move out of the village…I find that the more I know of the place, or of one particular spot, the more I find to paint…I don’t think I’m painting what I feel about scenery, certainly not scenery with a name; because that is the north-east, just vast wastes, vast seas, vast areas of cliff…well – you’ve just go to paint it.’ (As quoted in Elliott and Galastro, op.cit., p.11) As revealed in Haystack and Gate (Lot 171), Eardley was finely attuned to the turn of the seasons, the farming calendar and varying lighting conditions. She captured the ripening of the crops, their harvesting and the fecund forms of the resultant stacks. Here one is positioned at the centre of a composition based on thickly painted passages in which the higgledy-piggledy gate and fence are picked out in rich detail.