WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 28 November 2022 at 6pm

72 43 Colin Middleton MBE RHA RUA (1910-1983) THE PARK: COLERAINE, 1956 oil on canvas signed lower left; signed, titled, dated [June], numbered [218] and with Tom Caldwell Gallery label on reverse 26 by 30in. (66 by 76.2cm) Frame Size: 31 by 35.5in. (78.7 by 90.2cm) Exhibired: ‘Paintings by Colin Middleton’, Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, October 1958, catalogue no. 13; ’Colin Middleton: Paintings 1940-1962’, Magee Gallery, Belfast, catalogue no. 19 In 1955 Colin Middleton moved to Portrush, taking up a post at Coleraine Technical Institute only a few years after having written of his reluctance to become a teacher. Having been enabled to paint full-time by Victor Waddington’s support while he was showing with his gallery in Dublin, by 1954 Middleton was rarely in touch with his dealer and appears to have stopped sending him new work, ending a period of great achievement and progress for Middleton. It is notable, however, that Middleton’s work during this period between 1953 and 1958 does not seem to have been affected by his precarious professional and financial situation. Continuing the expressionist style of painting Middleton had developed at the end of the previous decade, The Park, Coleraine begins to establish a more abstract rendering of forms that anticipates Middleton’s less representational work in the 1960s. The heightened use of local colour matches the repeated stylised shapes to create an intense and vivid pattern across the canvas and maintains the exuberance of Middleton’s north Down landscapes of the mid-1950s. The figures sitting in the park play a compositional role but also provide a sense of human activity and some narrative interest. Again, it often seems to have been at difficult times that Middleton expressed this sense of kinship with others through his work and an evocation of the quiet pleasures of daily life that is quite different from the powerful and passionate figures that occur in his paintings from the late 1940s and 1950s. Dickon Hall, October 2022 €25,000-€35,000 (£21,550-£30,170 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot43