'Two Children' by Joan Eardley
This audio clip describes the painting Two Children by Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley (1921–1963).
It has been created for use as part of our primary school resource, The Superpower of Looking, in order to support pupils with blindness or visual impairment to take part in the lessons.
Explore the painting further in our resource, Joan Eardley paints the children of Glasgow.
Full audio description text
Like an illustration from a children's book, two young girls, facing us, link hands on this canvas that is just over a metre square. It's covered with oil paint of various colours, including scarlet red and small patches of yellow, blue and grey; there are also colourful foil sweet wrappers stuck into its surface. A few words are stencilled across the top left corner: metal store, licenced broker, scrap, rags, hair, woollens.
Called Two Children, it was made by Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley in 1963. The children have rusty, reddish hair, falling to their shoulders from a centre parting. Their faces are grey, and they look shyly out at us, unsmiling. The one on the left holds her free hand to her mouth and wears a shapeless white dress with long sleeves. Her right sleeve and the bodice, or top part of the dress, are smeared with red and there's a pattern of black squares almost like tyre tracks on the skirt which is frayed at its knee-length hem. Her red stockinged legs disappear against the red background making her seem ghostly and unstable, her feet twisting in splashes of white that suggest her shoes.
Her friend's feet and legs – sketched in a rusty red – are also hard to make out. Her dress is also patterned with small black squares, on a pink skirt and a brownish-white bodice. Strands of wool in different colours stream from her shoulders past her waist, as if she is wearing a multicoloured cloak.
A folded pink newspaper stuck into the red background in line with her left arm announces 'sale' in bold black letters.
