Colin Middleton

Colin Middleton (29 January 1910 – 23 December 1983) was a Northern Irish landscape artist, figure painter, and surrealist.

Middleton's prolific output in an eclectic variety of modernist styles is characterised by an intense inner vision, augmented by his lifelong interest in documenting the lives of ordinary people.

He has been described as ‘Ireland's greatest surrealist.’

Middleton was born in 1910 in Victoria Gardens in north Belfast, the only child of damask designer Charles Middleton.

He attended the nearby Belfast Royal Academy until 1927 and then continued his studies with night classes at Belfast School of Art where he trained in design under the Cornish artist Newton Penprase.

However Middleton found the college too traditional in outlook, as his first influence, his Father, had been a follower of European Modernism, particularly the Impressionists.

Middleton was also a poet and writer, whom along with his wife, was an active member of the Northern Drama League in the 1930s, with whom he designed sets.

After the death of his first wife he destroyed all of his early paintings and entered a period of seclusion at his Mother's home outside Belfast.

Middleton became a follower of Van Gogh and also of James Ensor after viewing exhibitions in London and Belgium respectively.

On his return to Ulster he began to experiment with styles derived from European Modernism, the antithesis to traditional academism.

Throughout the thirties he was also a keen follower of Paul Nash, Tristam Hillier and Edward Wadsworth.

After exposure to the works of Salvador Dali, Middleton declared himself "the only surrealist painter working in Ireland".

Middleton showed his first works with the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1931, where he was to exhibit frequently until the late nineteen-forties.

He first came to public attention with the inclusion of his works in the groundbreaking inaugural exhibition of the Ulster Unit at Locksley Hall, Belfast in December 1933.

The Ulster Unit was a short-lived grouping of Ulster artists who took their inspiration from Paul Nash's Unit One formed earlier in the same year.

Just two years thereafter In the same year Middleton married Maye McLain, also an artist and a domestic science teacher, who was to die only four years later.

He had worked at the business since his Father's death in 1933.

His work first appeared at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1938 where he was to show intermittently until the final year of his life.

36 Arthur Street Belfast was the venue for a joint exhibition with the Czech artist Otakar Gregor, Joan Loewenthal and Sidney Smith in aid of the war effort at the end of 1940.

Middleton completed three paintings immediately after the Belfast Blitz and the trauma of the events prevented him from working for six months before his work was included in a portfolio of lithographs published by the Ulster Academy in December 1941 to raise money for rebuilding the Ulster Children's and Women's Hospital which had been destroyed in the Blitz earlier in the year.

Middleton's first solo exhibition was given by the Belfast Municipal Gallery and Museum in 1943.

It was the first exhibition staged at the Gallery when they re-opened after the Belfast Blitz.

At the time it was the largest one-person show the gallery had staged comprising one hundred fifteen works and it was also the first solo exhibition accorded to a local contemporary artist by the gallery.

In part these women reflect his experience of Belfast and the difficult conditions that so many lived through.” This can be seen in the three female figures of The Poet’s Garden (1943), and even more so in The Conspirators (1942), both of which featured in the 1943 exhibition.

“The female form, pictorially and symbolically, becomes the landscape and the life force.” The Belfast exhibition was followed by his first one-man show at the Grafton Gallery, Dublin in 1944.

In 1945 Middleton was married for the second time, to Kate Giddens, after both had been named co-respondents at the Belfast High Court a few months earlier, in civil servant Lionel P Barr's application for a decree-nisi.

The suit was undefended and the couple had costs awarded against them.

In the same year Middleton returned to the Belfast Museum for a solo exhibition arranged by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts.

Middleton was a founding member of the Northern Ireland branch of the Artists International Association, who showed at the Belfast Municipal Gallery in spring 1945.

Other members included Joan Loewenthal, Kathleen Crozier, Pat Hicking, Trude Neu, Sidney Smith, Nevill Johnston, George Campbell and Gerard Dillon.

Middleton's work was displayed in New York's Associated American Artists Galleries in 1947 with a selection of works chosen by the Dublin art critic Theodore Goodman that included paintings by his Northern contemporaries Dan O'Neill, George Campbell, Gerard Dillon and Patrick Scott.

Middleton also retired from the family business that year to devote his time to painting.

Middleton then took his wife and child to live and work on John Middleton Murry's Suffolk commune for a short period, before returning to Belfast in 1948.

Although their new life in Suffolk was not a success as the family suffered from ill health, the experience of working the land was to prove a profound influence on Middleton's future work.

In the following year Middleton debuted at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art where he was to return on a number of occasions, particularly in the periods 1949–55 and 1963–71.

In 1949 Middleton showed his first works at the Oireachtas, where he was to return periodically until 1977.

It was Waddington's patronage that enabled the Middleton family to live and work in Ardglass, County Down for four years from 1949, which Middleton later described as the happiest time of his life.

When his works were displayed at Victor Waddington's Dublin gallery in that same year, it acted as a springboard that opened Middleton's work to an international audience.

Upon their return from Suffolk, Middleton's wife sent Victor Waddington photos of his work whereupon Waddington came to represent Middleton for a period of five years, until the Gallery faced financial hardship in 1958.

In an interview with Patrick Murphy in 1980, Middleton said that these paintings represented ‘a first endeavour to Harmonize the seemingly opposed and conflicting tendencies in human nature.’ Dickon Hall says of this period that “Middleton’s painting is dominated by the female form; it is only rarely that men appear in his work.