Colin Middleton, R.H.A.

Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin, where purchased by a private collector in the early 1950s and thence by descent to the present owner

Dublin, Irish Exhibition of Living Art, 1951, no. 5;
London, Arthur Tooth & Sons, Colin Middleton: Paintings 1947-1952, 21 October - 8 November 1952, no.7

Original canvas.The work appears in very good overall condition with a rich impastoed surface, clean and ready to hang. Under ultraviolet light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a tan coloured gilt plaster frame under glass; unexamined out of frame.
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Victor Waddington began to represent Colin Middleton in November 1948, shortly after the painter returned to Belfast from a year spent at John Middleton Murry’s community farm in Thelnetham. Waddington and Middleton quickly developed a close friendship and often discussed long term plans for promoting his work within Ireland and beyond.

These plans involved showing Middleton’s work in London, Europe and the USA, as well as at Waddington’s Dublin gallery, and ensuring that certain key paintings should be seen by as wide a public as possible. The Life Everlasting belonged within this small group of works.

Completed late in 1950, just after Middleton’s second exhibition with Waddington in Dublin, the latter decided it should 'not be shown until the proper time and place occurs' (letter from Victor Waddington to Colin Middleton, 6 April 1951, private collection). It followed Give Me To Drink, The Power and the Glory and Isaiah 54 (the latter two both admired by Kokoschka and Jack Yeats) as multi-figure compositions on a larger scale than the canvases Middleton typically used. After the birth of his daughter Jane in July, the autumn of 1950 was a period of intense production and when these new paintings arrived in Dublin in March 1951 Waddington immediately sent a telegram to say that all at the gallery were 'wildly excited' (Telegram from Victor Waddington, 14 March 1951, Colin Middleton Archive, NMNI).

It appears that Waddington might immediately have bought the painting himself from Middleton, as it appears in accounts of sales from April 1952. It was shown in the 1951 Irish Exhibition of Living Art, but was not for sale. Waddington saw these exhibitions as important in maintaining his artists’ reputation, despite Middleton’s dislike of them. The Life Everlasting was praised at length in the Dublin Magazine review of the exhibition, its 'glorious' colour 'the instrument whereby he expresses a poetic vision of everyday life…In his work meaning is primarily the function of intense feeling, translated…into colour and form' (Review of Irish Exhibition of Living Art, The Dublin Magazine, October-December 1951).

Waddington exhibited The Life Everlasting as the centrepiece of a small group of Middleton’s paintings in his gallery window in August 1952, shortly before it was included in his first solo exhibition in London, held at the Tooth Gallery in October 1952. It was also discussed a year on in a substantial article devoted to Middleton in The Studio, written by Edward Sheehy, where he noted a crucial aspect of Middleton’s work, that these figures are for him deeply and intensely rooted in a particular place, in this case Ardglass, as well as acquiring 'a universal significance by virtue of the power through which their particular condition is realised' (E. Sheehy, ‘Colin Middleton’, The Studio, September 1953, p.77).

Middleton’s complex response to the post-war world is at the heart of his work at this time. There is a sense of the universality of suffering that responds both to the effects of the war and also to a broader sense of spiritual desolation, and the Biblical titles of many of the greatest works of this period seem to identify the need for a redemptive spiritual force to overcome the physical suffering and emotional confusion Middleton perceived. As he wrote to Middleton Murry in 1947, 'The seed must take root in the ruin; many seeds' (Letter from Colin Middleton to John Middleton Murry, 1 March 1947, Colin Middleton Archive, NMNI). The adoption of a more expressive and direct manner of using paint, with a vibrant and contrasting palette and a very physically worked paint surface, matches the intensity of his subject matter.

Middleton saw himself as belonging in a European painting tradition and one of his great heroes was Cézanne; he described the experience of seeing his Card Players on a visit to the Tate late in 1947, and this painting seems to be on his mind in The Life Everlasting, most obviously in the bottle at the centre of the composition. The present work is, however, more overtly emotional than the Cézanne, with the highly expressive treatment and arrangement of the hands typical of Middleton’s work of this period.

We are grateful to Dickon Hall for kindly preparing this catalogue entry.