Pat Samson’s ginger hair needs a good brush and there’s a squint in her right eye. She’s smiling, bouncy almost, sitting with her hands in her lap, wearing a red frock and a pink cardigan. Beside her is her sister Ann, who looks more sombre, her lips closed over buck teeth. She’s in a white dress with yellow flowers. The pair, wearing clothes kept in a box by the woman painting them, are captured shoulder to shoulder, close – just as they are today.
Pat and Ann Samson are two of a family of 12 children who became subjects for the painter Joan Eardley, now recognised as one of the great talents of 20th-century Scottish art. Drawn to Glasgow’s Townhead area, and especially Rottenrow, where soot-covered, often overcrowded tenement buildings were awaiting demolition, Eardley found first a studio and then her subjects, the sparky “weans” who clattered round the streets and closes. These included the Samsons: seven boys and five girls.
