People intimately involved in the acclaimed paintings of Joan Eardley were on hand to greet the opening of a major new exhibition of her work.

Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which opens on December 3, focusses on two of her main subjects, the Townhead area of Glasgow and the fishing village of Catterline on the north east coast of Scotland.

The press view of the show, saw several people associated with the painter attend, including Anne Morrison-Hudson, Eardley's niece, Pat McLean, Anne McKenna and Mary McDonald who posed for the painter as children in Glasgow and Ronald Stephen, who lived in Catterline.

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The show about the artist, who lived from 1921 to 1963, includes paintings borrowed from both private and public collections and a largely unknown archive of sketches and photographs gifted to the National Galleries by Eardley’s sister Pat Black in 1987.

New research has pinpointed the exact locations of many of the paintings, and detailed maps of Townhead and Catterline feature in the exhibition, which runs until May 21 next year.

Patrick Elliott, chief curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: "We have tried to recreate Eardley’s working process, to show how she made the work, from sketch to finished painting, and attempted to track her movements as precisely as possible: in many of the Catterline paintings, you can say exactly where she was standing, almost down to the nearest inch.

"Visitors to the exhibition will, as it were, be looking over her shoulder, in what will be the most detailed and personal insight into Eardley’s life and art to date."

Born in Sussex in 1921, Joan Eardley moved to Glasgow in 1940 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art.

Her paintings of children playing in rundown tenements and her Catterline landscapes are among the most celebrated works in Scottish art.

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She died at the age of 42 from cancer.

Eardley moved regularly between Townhead and Catterline.

A Sense of Place displays many photographs made by Eardley and her friend Audrey Walker during this time – of children, corner shops and tenements.

Her interest in painting children dramatically increased with the relocation to a studio on St James’ Road in 1953, where she lived near the Samsons, a family of twelve children.

The family were all willing models and are captured within many of the works in A Sense of Place.