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The Independent
4 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Joan Eardley Sketches of Glasgow street children to be sold at auction
Sketches depicting Glasgow street children by artist Joan Eardley will go on sale at auction next week. The 11 small pastel and charcoal drawings were selected from one of Eardley's sketchbooks which was given to a doctor after her death by her close friend Angus Neil, who died in 1992. Eardley is considered one of the great British artists of the 20th century and the collection is to be sold live online and in Edinburgh by auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull on June 5. The works depict studies of street children in Townhead for which she is best known, alongside sketches of Catterline on the north-east coast of Scotland where she lived with Mr Neil. The friends met at Scottish art school Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, Angus, in 1947 and Mr Neil would often stay in her Townhead studio for long periods of time. When Eardley moved to Catterline, he helped renovate her cottage and became a fixture around the small fishing village. After the war, Mr Neil struggled with his mental health and Eardley became a pivotal figure in his life, looking out for him and helping him financially. When Eardley died of cancer in 1963 aged 42, a distraught Mr Neil was admitted to the psychiatric hospital Sunnyside Royal near Montrose. The sketchbook was given by Mr Neil to a GP in Glasgow in the 1960s, who had provided him with room and board during a breakdown, and has been treasured by the family ever since. The auction also includes four large works by Eardley, including Fishing Nets, Catterline, which is valued at £30,000-£50,000. It featured in a major exhibition of Eardley's work in the National Galleries of Scotland in 2016-17. Jeannie, valued at £40,000-£60,000, depicts an elderly lady, Jeannie Kelso, who was befriended by Eardley during holidays to the Isle of Arran in the early 1940s. Blue Jersey, which depicts a child holding her baby brother, is estimated to fetch between £20,000 and £30,000. A rare example of an early Eardley painting, Street Scene, from the 1940s, has a valuation of £7,000-£10,000. Charlotte Riordan, senior specialist at Lyon & Turnbull, said: 'These sketches epitomise the intuitive mark-making and consummate skill of Joan Eardley. To me, they also speak volumes about the woman herself; they're direct – blunt even – but clever and charismatic. A total original.'
ABC News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Picasso: Series 1 Episode 1
Picasso NEW SERIES Arts Documentary History Watch Article share options Share this on Facebook Twitter Send this by Email Copy link WhatsApp Messenger When Pablo Picasso died in 1973, the world mourned a superstar, a revolutionary who turned the story of 20th century art on its head. This series opens the door on the paintings, places and people that he left behind.
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lovers, haters, rivals and chums – Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists review
Standing in front of Frank Auerbach's quietly harrowing charcoal portrait of Leon Kossoff and Kossoff's own heavily textured, dour portrait of Auerbach, I felt as if I was caught between the gazes of the two artists. Caught in the balance of their stares, seeing the way each sees the other, I was both implicated and invisible. Moments like these are the most intimate and affecting in Pallant House's new exhibition of portraits of artists by artists. When a portrait of one artist by another is hung beside their portrait of the other, we find ourselves caught between them. There are many pairs of lovers featured, including Matthew Smith and his mistress Vera Cunningham or Lucian Freud and Celia Paul, as well as works by friends such as Auerbach and Kossoff or Nina Hamnett and Roger Fry. In some cases, such as the two paintings by Smith and Cunningham, it's easy to see how the two artists influenced each other as they found a shared visual language of heavy, impressionistic brushstrokes and a dark, jewel-like palette. In others, the aesthetic distinctness is what draws you in. There are also delightful little moments in which multiple paintings of the same artist are hung together, all painted by different people. The exhibition moves chronologically from the turn of the 20th century to the present, and there is a series of portraits of Walter Sickert at the start of the exhibition by three different women in his life: his friends Sylvia Gosse and Nina Hamnett, and one of his wives, Thérèse Lessore. Each portrays him entirely differently: Gosse shows him standing in profile, his middle-aged potbelly declaring his prosperity; Hamnett shows only his face, gazing directly at her from under the brim of his black hat; Lessore shows him from the back, the profile of his face hardly legible. The complexity of trying to convey a likeness in a portrait is profoundly evident when confronted with a group like this. If these women who knew Sickert so well each paint him so differently, what was he really like? Perhaps only via many representations can the real man begin to emerge. Moving from the bohemian London of early 20th century through pre-war modernism and eventually to pop art, the London School, the YBAs, and up to the present, this exhibition makes a compelling case for a story of British modern art that is communal and collaborative. The interlocking circles of portraits that emerge make it obvious that the avant garde movements that evolved in and out of existence throughout 20th-century Britain were as social as they were professional. Walking through the galleries feels like drifting through a cocktail party, going from group to group of interesting, chatty friends – much like the scene of a Slade tea party painted by Seóirse Macantisionnaigh. There is rivalry and darkness here, too – husband and wife John Bratby and Jean Cooke's portraits of each other are hung on either side of a doorway, which neatly emphasises the antagonism between them. Sickert's portrait of unhappily married couple Roald Kristian and Nina Hamnett oozes with their apathy for each other, and Cedric Morris's remarkably unflattering portrait of Barbara Hepworth can readily be read as a document of his dislike for her. The exhibition is the last in Pallant House's ambitious trilogy of exhibitions on modern British art – exploring first still life, then landscape and now portraits. There are moments when the exhibition feels like it belongs at the National Portrait Gallery, as it can feel it is tracing celebrity rather than aesthetic exchange. But for the most part, it triumphs in crafting a cohesive story of visual, and literal, conversations between artists on the canvas. I wanted it to be bigger, and kept thinking of artists who I felt were missing, which is a sign of how effective the curatorial construct is: it welcomes a way of considering the history of art via relationships, which is inherently expansive. There are always more artists to include. The contemporary section of the show is the biggest and most broad. It includes portraits of real-life friends, including a wonderful group of three iconic works by the artists Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough, who have been painting portraits of themselves together since their student days in Glasgow. It also includes portraits exploring relationships between artists of the present with those of the past. Gillian Wearing's photograph of herself as Georgia O'Keeffe, for example, or Caroline Coon's reimagined painting of the pop artist Pauline Boty, widen the notion of a relationship to include transhistorical, imagined but still intimate relationships between artists through time. The exhibition has a circular route, so it both opens and closes with Lubaina Himid's painted wooden figures of female artists from the past and present, including Élisabeth Vigée-le Brun, Frida Kahlo, Bridget Riley (represented entirely by stripes), and Himid's real-life friend, Claudette Johnson. The life-sized women are a fitting encapsulation of the exhibition's ethos: that artists see each other with profound depth, and that art itself is born out of intimacy and influence. Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 17 May to 2 November
Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Heiress: Sargent's American Portraits review — an old-style triumph
I share a birthday with John Singer Sargent: January 12. It's just a quirk of dates and means nothing. But for the kinds of inchoate human reasons that swirl about in the darker and stupider regions of the mind, it has always made him feel closer to me than other artists. Perhaps it is why I have been harsh with him in some reviews. With Sargent, it feels personal. Not that I am alone in mistrusting the talents of this flashy, quick-wristed, heiress-hunting society lapdog, who strolled about the fashionable salons of Europe in white linen sniffing out the money. For most of the 20th century Sargent (1856-1925) was looked down on by critics as a decadent presence. His pictorial talents were obvious. But so
