In 1951, Joan Eardley sent a letter to her best friend, Margot Sandeman, in which she expresses her frustration about her own 'scrappy' attempts to paint the countryside around Gers in Southwestern France, where she was on an extended summer holiday.
Eardley wrote: 'The thing is that I never produce anything which has anything like the intensive complete feeling which your paintings have. Mine are much more only just scrappy sort of notes – sort of journalistic.'
Today, Eardley, who died aged 42 in 1963, is considered one of the greatest artists to emerge from Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast, Sandeman's star has quietly risen, championed by the likes of curator and art historian Joan Hughson, as well as Glasgow gallerists Cyril Gerber and his daughter Jill of Gerber Fine Art.
When Eardley and Sandeman were students at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in the early years of the Second World War, they were both considered outstanding artists by Hugh Adam Crawford, Head of Drawing and Painting.
In Cordelia Oliver's long-out-of-print publication, Joan Eardley RSA, published in 1988 to mark 25 years since Eardley's death, Oliver, a fellow student of Eardley and Sandeman at GSA, describes their friendship as 'a two-way flow of creative influence that stopped well short of imitative flattery on either side'.
Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley (1921–1963) 
According to Oliver, Crawford kept a close eye on the seven or eight full-time GSA Diploma students in the three year groups during that period, picking out those who 'seemed to show a greater blend than usual of talent and commitment'.
Oliver writes: 'In the unusual circumstances of that 1939/1940 session, Crawford decided to put a cherished experiment to the test. A small select group of recent students with above-average potential was given special attention, with more time spent on the practice of drawing and painting than was allowed in the General Course curriculum. For that reason, the chosen few, Eardley and Sandeman among them, enjoyed what was virtually a three-year, rather than a two-year senior course in drawing and painting, with Crawford himself as tutor.'
Later, recalling Sandeman's work in 1971, Crawford remarked: 'Margot's work has an inner structure, which is not an optical thing.'
Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum currently has a small selection of work by Sandeman on display in its Fragile Gallery. The display, No More Sheep: Margot Sandeman in Arran, features six paintings, four of which were gifted to Glasgow Life Museums by Joan Hughson. The other two works were purchased in 2004 with support from the National Fund for Acquisitions and Friends of Glasgow Museums.
This small group of works in acrylic and ink perfectly encapsulates the glowing light, as well as the landscapes of Arran. In each one, there is a spiritual, almost biblical connection with sheep, land and sea.
Margot Sandeman was born in Glasgow in May 1922. She was the daughter of Muriel Boyd, an internationally acclaimed embroiderer who studied under Jessie Newbery and Ann Macbeth at Glasgow School of Art, and Archibald Sandeman, a trained chemist and self-taught amateur watercolourist, who worked with his family firm of Sandeman Brothers Limited.
As a child, Sandeman grew up 'saturated by art' in the suburb of Bearsden to the north of Glasgow. The family lived at Lochend Farmhouse, one of the oldest houses in Bearsden. Watercolour paintings by her father and embroidery panels by her mother adorned the walls of Lochend. Even the garden had its own artistic touches, including a laurel bush shaped like a house with a chimney head and a section cut out to represent a front door.
Drawing and painting on holidays to Arran were an integral part of Margot's early life, a tradition which she continued with her friend Joan Eardley and then with her husband, ceramicist James Robson.
In 1973, Margot and James bought a bothy in High Corrie on the Isle of Arran (off the west coast of Scotland), and the family used this as a second home for the next three decades. High Corrie, perched on the edge of a steep hillside overlooking the sea on one side and the distinctive peak of Goat Fell on the other, provided much in the way of artistic inspiration for the couple.
John Maclauchlan Milne (1885–1957) 
High Corrie was popular with artists. The painter John Maclauchlan Milne lived there from 1940 until his death, producing works such as High Corrie, now in the collection of the McLean Museum and Art Gallery, Greenock.
James Sandeman brought an Arts and Crafts philosophy similar to their home in Bearsden to the bothy, stocking it with ceramics for everyday use – many of which appear in his wife's paintings as she explored the medium of still life from the early 1980s onwards.
Margot Sandeman continued to paint quietly poetic landscapes of Arran and the west coast of Scotland. She also painted lyrical interior still lifes influenced by poetry, the classics and the Arts and Crafts tradition until she died in 2009, aged 86.
Her friendship with Joan Eardley remained a defining creative relationship. Writing to Sandeman while travelling in Italy on a scholarship from GSA and the Royal Scottish Academy in 1948/1949, Eardley says in a letter from Assisi, where she was looking at frescoes by Giotto: 'I wish you were here.... because I do feel you could make more use of it than I can.... One tends to get horribly used to beauty.'
Once Sandeman's two sons – born in 1957 and 1960 – moved into adulthood, she found time and space to devote to her art. From the mid-1960s onwards, she formed a close working relationship with another contemporary from GSA, Ian Hamilton Finlay (he attended the art school from 1941 to 1942). The pair collaborated on publications such as his poetry magazine, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (Wild Hawthorn Press), as well as a series of still life paintings throughout the 1980s.
The 1988 painting Twine (with Ian Hamilton Finlay) is one of a number of works on which Sandeman collaborated with Finlay, with him providing the 'poetic brief'. In this work, the use of twine is linked to republican ideals, but Sandeman provides the classical ballast of a candle burned almost to the wick and intense colour in the shape of red berries and vivid blue cord.
Sandeman tends to be written about in tandem with friends and collaborators, Eardley and Finlay, but her work stands on its own merits.
In her lifetime and beyond, the Lillie Art Gallery in Milngavie, near Glasgow, has consistently promoted her work. The gallery has several works in its collection, including Bramble Picking II and Two Figures in a Landscape.
In October 1991, Scotland on Sunday's art critic, W. Gordon Smith, reviewed a retrospective of Sandeman's work at the Lillie.
He wrote: 'It could be the work of Matisse or a Japanese master but in its austerity, tonal harmony and harnessed energy, it is emblematic of Sandeman and her ability to make line and colour dance to the same hypnotic tune… She is painter and poet, musician and seer, designer and decorator, feminine and gentle. And a magician forbye.'
Sandeman's work glows with mysticism, depicting an almost unreachable yet recognisable world peppered with lonely figures, sheep, lush vegetation and emblematic motifs. Poetry winds its way through her paintings by design. Enigmatic and strange, with trademark bold and flat forms separated by dark contours conjuring up experimental work by Post-Impressionists, there is an inherent narrative in all her work.
Two Painters in a Landscape (Margot and Joan)
1960
Margot Sandeman (1922–2009) 
Two Painters in a Landscape (Margot and Joan), painted by Margot in 1960, three years before Eardley's death, is a strange and intense work. A sheep is in the foreground. Joan is on the left, in trademark men's clothes, legs crossed, staring off into the middle distance – a palette discarded by her side. Margot is on the right – reaching towards Joan with a deliberately skewed arm. Is that a brush in her hand? The two artists' bond is clear, but there is something deeper going on.
As Joan put it, in Margot's world, there is an intensive complete feeling, often just out of reach.
Jan Patience, journalist, broadcaster and author
This content was funded by the PF Charitable Trust
Further reading
I am indebted to Joan Hughson for much of the information in this article. Her 2011 publication, At Home in Bearsden and Corrie (Hughson Gallery), gives especially interesting background about the life and work of Margot Sandeman and her parents.
Cordelia Oliver's out-of-print 1988 publication, Joan Eardley, RSA (Mainstream Publishing), offers fascinating detail on Eardley and Sandeman at GSA and on Arran.
Arran Heritage Trail also contextualises Eardley and Sandeman's time on Arran.
