Cottages at Catterline

Lil Neilson, a fellow artist, shared a house with Eardley in Catterline, the fishing village on the north-east coast, south of Aberdeen. 'She provided just the sort of intelligent companionship so desperately needed to combat the loneliness and depression that, in Joan's final years, alternated with frenetic spells of painting. It is Lil who remembers the amazement she felt at the sight of the canvases coming up the brae, day after day. "It was as though some floodgate had burst. As though she was enchanted" (see C. Oliver, Joan Eardley, Edinburgh, 1988, p. 85).