Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley (18 May 1921 – 16 August 1963) was a British artist noted for her portraiture of street children in Glasgow and for her landscapes of the fishing village of Catterline and surroundings on the North-East coast of Scotland.

Her mother, Irene Helen Morrison, (1891–1991), was Scottish and had met Captain William Edwin Eardley, (1887–1929), during World War One when he was stationed in Glasgow.

The couple married at the end of the war, but Captain Eardley experienced episodes of depression and suffered a mental breakdown during Joan's early childhood.

[11][6] In January 1940 Eardley enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art as a day student where she studied under Hugh Adam Crawford and was influenced by the Scottish Colourists.

Her diploma painting, a self-portrait in oil on plyboard, is her only extant example of formal portraiture and she was awarded the school's Sir James Guthrie Prize for it.

[9][16] Her biographer Christopher Andreae notes it as nevertheless a remarkably informal picture, a precursor to the charcoal studies she made in Italy and these in turn a preparation for her many drawing, pastels and paintings of Glasgow street children.

[17]: 117 [18] The prize, a biography of Guthrie by Sir James L. Caw and published by Macmillan & Co. of London in 1932, is still in the possession of Eardley's family.

This work, which, throughout 1944 included painting camouflage patterns on landing craft for the war effort, allowed Eardley to attend evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art until 1946.

[3] During the war, her painting of her shipyard work mates, The Mixer Men, was shown at Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.

[20][21] She returned to Scotland to continue her studies in 1947 at Hospitalfield House, in Arbroath under James Cowie, who influenced her choice of everyday subject matter.

The building depicted is the Scuola Grande di San Marco, built in the fifteenth century as a great philanthropic confraternity.

[9] In 1949 Eardley set up a studio in Glasgow, in the deprived and overcrowded Townhead area, all of which was earmarked for demolition at the time.

[16] In Townhead her drawings and paintings were known to be of the poorest city children, often playing in the streets in ragged clothes, the older girls looking after younger siblings.

[16] In other paintings from this time Eardley used collage, incorporating scraps of newspapers and sweet wrappers, along with elements of graffiti and shop signs, often from abandoned shopfronts.

[30] Eardley started to spend part of each year away from Glasgow in Catterline, until 1961 when the small village became her permanent home.

[21] She painted landscapes showing the changing seasons in the fields around the village, her thickly textured paintwork sometimes incorporating real pieces of vegetation.

[32] To Summer Fields (c.1961) Eardley added grass pieces to the paint surface while Harvest (1960–61) includes elements of grit.

[35] When she heard of a storm approaching the coast, Eardley would travel by train from Glasgow to Stonehaven and then ride her Lambretta to Catterline.

Eardley was cared for by friends at Catterline throughout her last months and died at Killearn Hospital in August 1963 at the age of 42, with her mother, sister and Audrey Walker at her bedside.

Eardley had first met Walker, who was ten years older than her and was married to a prominent Scottish barrister, in 1952 in Glasgow.

[41] According to Dr Janet McKenzie of the National Galleries of Scotland, Eardley's untimely death "meant that she was never given the stature she deserved.

"[21][37] Murdo Macdonald says of Eardley's Catterline seascapes: "[S]he committed herself to understanding the sea more than any other painter since William McTaggart in the 1890s.

Rather than just responding to the attraction of the coastline, she painted with the perception of a mariner aware that waves are heavy, fast moving lumps of water, as able to kill as to support.

In this she reinvigorated a maritime trend in Scottish art..."[42][21] One of her biographers, Cordelia Oliver, observed that, "for her a truly successful painting had to go deeper than a mere visual record, no matter how accurate... [H]er success lay in her ability to combine the acute, uncompromising painter's eye with a warm human sympathy and understanding".