Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
‘Life is at its most uninhibited here,’ Joan Eardley said of Townhead, then a slum in the centre of Glasgow. The painter, who was born 100 years ago this month, set up her studio there in 1949, fresh from her studies at Glasgow School of Art. Though she spent long spells in Catterline, an impoverished fishing village on the east coast, south of Aberdeen, Eardley would maintain a studio in Townhead until her premature death from breast cancer in 1963, at the age of just 42. She had found here ‘a little community […] where everybody knew everybody else’. She made it both her métier and her home.