Glasgow Kids, a Saturday Matinée Picture Queue

This important early painting by Eardley depicts children queuing up for an afternoon cinema showing, probably in Townhead. Glasgow at the time was known as 'Cinema City' because there were more cinemas per head of population than anywhere else outside of America. In Townhead there were three cinemas within short walking distance of each other: Hamilton Regal and Odeon on Townhead Road; and La Scala, a street away. The cinema provided escapism from the reality of post-war urban life with its poverty, overcrowding and substandard housing. There were huge queues for performances and Saturday matinee clubs were particularly popular. Children could get in for a jam jar, or 'jeely jar' (glass was expensive, so you were paid to return jars). In this painting the red neon lights of the cinema can be seen reflected in the faces of the excited children as they jostle, tustle and shout while they wait. One boy has his arm around the shoulders of a red-haired girl; they glance over their shoulders at a boy creating a commotion behind them. To their right a boy with his hand coolly holding onto a ledge has his hair styled in a fashionable Teddy Boy quiff. The child in front of him has his yellow jacket over his head, perhaps protecting himself from the rain, pretending to be a superhero from a film, or just hiding his lolly from the other kids; the child beside him seems to look on rather enviously.

In 1949 Eardley was renting an attic studio at 21 Cochrane Street, near the City Chambers. Since her time at art school she had found herself drawn to Townhead in the east end of the city, later describing it as 'the living part of Glasgow where the people are'. This painting is the result of a series of ink, chalk and conte drawings she made of the children in the slums around Rottenrow in Townhead. Eardley painted the figures in a purposely naïve style that captures their youth and energy, using bright colours, simplified shapes and outlining forms. The influence of early drawings of childhood by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is apparent. She omitted extraneous details of building and street, we don't know the cinema in front of which they were queuing. The focus is simply the children, their relationships, their anticipation and excitement.

In 1949 Eardley had just returned from a formative trip to France and Italy, having won travelling scholarships from Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Scottish Academy. Letters home show that she saw the work of Picasso in Paris. However, the flat colour, the simplified freize-like arrangement of figures and the way the children are contained within a small restricted space also recalls the Italian Renaissance frescoes that Eardley saw in churches in Italy, particularly Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua. In this way Eardley gives this Glasgow scene as much importance as a religious tableaux.

The painting also shows Eardley's burgeoning skill as a colourist. We see colour bold, balanced and decorative. From her time as a student at Glasgow School of Art she had impressed her tutor Hugh Adam Crawford with her innate colour sense. By 1949 she was teaching two evenings a week at the art school. This painting was shown at an exhibition in Glasgow School of Art in October 1949. As an interesting aside, at a time when there were limited venues in which to display contemporary art, Eardley later exhibited her work in cinemas, showing at the Gaumont Cinema in Aberdeen in 1950 and Cosmo Cinema (now the Glasgow Film Theatre) in 1958.

Credit: Gifted by the Trustees of the Hamilton Bequest, 1966