Joan Eardley deserves to be ranked alongside Bacon and de Kooning

Painting is a fight and few artists demonstrate this more emphatically than the volatile and complicated post-war master, Joan Eardley. Scotland’s great English artist or England’s great Scottish artist, box her as you will, she’s revered north of the border, but often oddly dismissed south of it. The Scottish public have been enthralled by her work for decades, and spoiled in their access to it, with 60 or so pieces in the National Galleries of Scotland collection alone (the Tate has just one). You’re rarely far from an Eardley here, and never more so than in this, her centenary year, which sees some 20 shows and events lined up to celebrate her life and work.

Only one of the exhibitions is in England, the country of Eardley’s birth. Visitors to the National Trust property at Mottisfont in Hampshire can enjoy three fine landscapes, but for the full Eardley experience explore Scotland (if allowed) and feast upon a rich, if scattered, display of drawing and painting from throughout her prolific but tragically short career.

Eardley died of cancer in 1963, at the age of just 43, but she left behind a prodigious quantity of portraits and landscapes, the best of which position her among the finest artists of her generation. Her Scotland is an emotional one, reflecting a challenging personal life, marked by deep depression, largely closeted lesbianism and punishing mood swings. A decade or so before her death, she wrote: ‘A terrible helpless, hopeless feeling has come upon me. Everything seems to be such a dreadful unending struggle.’ This state of mind characterised much of her adult life, and drove much of her best work.

Born in England to a Scottish mother and English father, Eardley experienced life-changing emotional trauma at the age of eight when her father killed himself and perhaps she never quite recovered.