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78 50 Colin Middleton MBE RHA RUA (1910-1983) THE LONG MEMORY [WESTERNESS SERIES], 1974/5 oil on board signed lower right; signed, titled, dated and with David Hendriks Gallery label on reverse 24 by 24in. (61 by 61cm) Frame Size: 30 by 30in. (76.2 by 76.2cm) Provenance: David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, 1976; Collection of Paul and Catherine Daly; Their sale, Adam’s 1 October 2008, lot 40; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Colin Middleton Exhibition’, David Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, March to April 1976, catalogue no. 15; ’Personal Choice Exhibition’, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, May to June 1982 (Pictures chosen from the collections of RichardWood, Dorothy Walker, Cecil King, Stanley & Elizabeth Mosse along with the Daly’s) One of the most compositionally innovative paintings of the Westerness Cycle, with its device of a picture within a picture, both using similar compositional arrangements, The Long Memory carries intriguing references across Middleton’s career. The Westerness series was the last major group of paintings Middleton completed; John Hewitt wrote that Middleton ‘preferred to think of his works as groups or series, as the means of expressing the range and ramifications of his visual reactions to experience, whether sensory or psychological’. (1) The Westerness series can be interpreted as the artist looking back over ideas, techniques and symbols that had remained significant to him, in the context of autobiographical experiences and events. The painting contrasts an enclosed space with an extensive landscape. The perspective of the composition is extended dramatically through the two tables whose boards line up towards the distant mountains in the frame, in a desert landscape which seems to have been inspired by the time Middleton spent in Australia. A female figure looks across this landscape, towards the black sun, which recalls an early surrealist painting by Middleton, The Yellow Door, 1941, a painting partly about disruption, instability and uncertainty. The inset image might be the artist referencing his own creative identity, expressing his own memories or the relationship of art to imagination, even perhaps the dichotomy of recalling or depicting a vast landscape while working in the enclosed space of a studio. The table forms a connection between the two images, as does the surface of the painting, which provides a consistency of texture across both images and encourages a sense that they interweave and overlap in a more complex manner than the clear division of the frame might suggest, that life and art, or memory, are not always easy to separate. Dickon Hall, October 2024 1 John Hewitt, ‘Colin Middleton Retrospective Show’, Irish Times, 23rd January 1976 €25,000-€35,000 (£21,010-£29,410 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot50