IMPORTANT IRISH ART 3 MARCH 2025

64 42 Colin Middleton MBE RHA RUA (1910-1983) SLIGO LANDSCAPE, 1940 oil on canvas signed and dated lower left; titled on reverse and inscribed on Sotheby’s label affixed to reverse 16 by 20in. (40.6 by 50.8cm) Frame Size: 21.25 by 25.25in. (54 by 64.1cm) Provenance: Purchased from the artist by the original owner, circa 1941-42; British and Irish Modernist Paintings from 1900, Christies, London, 7 March 1986, lot 308 (as Wind Through Trees in a Hilly Landscape); Collection of George and Maura McClelland; Latterly on loan from George and Maura McClelland to the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Whyte’s, 29 September 2008, lot 87; Private collection Landscape pre-occupied Colin Middleton throughout his career, although those that pre-date his move to Ardglass in the late 1940s are not well-known. Middleton’s sense of involvement with his surroundings had already been stimulated by Cave Hill and Belfast, where he grew up, as well as by visits to Donegal. He was as experimental as a landscape painter as he was in his other work and there are influences of neo-romanticism and impressionism in these paintings as well as a more general searching through styles. Middleton also seems to be exploring ways in which he could integrate his professional consciousness of design into painting. In 1928, Middleton was impressed by an exhibition of van Gogh’s work held in the Leicester Galleries in London and the present work foreshadows the influence that the Dutch painter will have on Middleton later in the 1940s. The swirling sky creates a pattern that runs throughout the work and is mirrored in the trees, but the patchwork of fields in the middle distance and the rhythmic blocks of colour into which the light breaks down the mountains are much more elements of Middleton the designer. Middleton employed similar techniques in abstracting and defining form in some landscape paintings of the 1970s, demonstrating the essential consistency of much of his work. Trees are the dominant feature of many of Middleton’s wartime landscapes. An early exhibition included Landscape with Trees, Cave Hill andWillows, Downpatrick, while Beeches, Glen Head andWillows, Dundrod were included in his extensive 1943 one-man exhibition in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery. The title Sligo Landscape seems to have been added to the stretcher here at a later date but it appears that this painting was not exhibited during Middleton’s lifetime. Dickon Hall €14,000-€18,000 (£11,670-£15,000 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot42