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

74 44 Colin Middleton MBE RHA RUA (1910-1983) TIERRA DEL FUEGO: THE WILDERNESS OF FIORENZA COSSOTTO, 1972-74 oil on board signed lower right; signed, titled, dated and with Tom Caldwell Gallery and Arts Council of Northern Ireland labels on reverse 24 by 24in. (61 by 61cm) Frame Size: 33 by 33in. (83.8 by 83.8cm) Provenance: Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast; Private collection; de Veres, 20 April 2009, lot 37; Private collection Exhibired: ‘Colin Middleton: Wilderness Series, Northern Hemisphere and Barcelona, 1972-74’, Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, catalogue no. 26 The 1970s were a decade of recognition for Colin Middleton, with two major retrospective loan exhibitions, the publication of a monograph by John Hewitt and the award of an MBE, and it also seems to have provided him with a period for reassessment. Partly thanks to a bursary awarded by the Arts Council he was able to give up teaching and to paint full-time for the first time since the mid-1950s and this also allowed him time for travel, which had always been an important stimulus in his work. The Wilderness Series is arguably the most important of the extensive series of works on which he embarked in this decade, revisiting his interest in surrealism and also integrating many aspects of his early training and work in design with his mature painting. They are complicated works, full of autobiographical references as well as technical experimentation. While they clearly relate to the long sea journeys Middleton undertook to visit two of his daughters, to Australia in 1972 to see Alison and then to Spain in 1974 to visit Jane, the concept of the wilderness also represented metaphysical ideas that were important to Middleton in the gestation of this series of paintings. Discussing his idea of the wilderness ‘in its Biblical sense - a place to which the soul withdraws from the immediate urgency of clocks and calendars to rediscover the continuum of survival’, Middleton also seems to refer in the present work to his own journey on the Southern Cross through the dramatic perspective of the wooden planks that recall the deck of a ship as much as the desk in this image. There is also perhaps an autobiographical allusion to damask design in the roll of fabric; it is arguably in the Wilderness Series that Middleton began to most obviously absorb aspects of design into his creative identity, having rejected it in the 1940s. Middleton also introduces into these paintings a bewildering range of references to cultural and sporting heroes, from Banjo Patterson, Kirsten Flagstad and Eddie Merckx to Fiorenze Cossotto in the present work, so that these works become not only increasingly personal but also full of cultural and contemporary references that almost seem at odds with the longing for escape into a personal wilderness. It is intriguing to see the composition of this painting in the context of Middleton’s own recollection that this series was influenced by seeing advertising hoardings set up in the middle of some of the barren landscapes through which he was driven on these journeys, a strange disjunction of consumer culture and ancient landscapes where escape and the survival of the soul might have been sought, and as unexpected a connection as Tierra del Fuego and the mezzo soprano Fiorenza Cossotto. Dickon Hall, November 2022 €30,000-€50,000 (£25,860-£43,100 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot44