Colin Middleton THE CONSPIRATORS
Lot 105
Result: Not Sold
Estimate: €20,000 - €30,000
Colin Middleton RHA, RUA, MBE, 1910-1983 THE CONSPIRATORS Oil on canvas, 18" x 24" (45.7 x 61cm), signed and dated Feb 8th 1942; signed and inscribed verso. Provenance: Purchased directly from the Artist, 1943, and hence by descent. Ex... Read more
Lot 105 - THE CONSPIRATORS by Colin Middleton Lot 105 Colin Middleton THE CONSPIRATORS
Estimate: €20,000 - €30,000
Colin Middleton RHA, RUA, MBE, 1910-1983
THE CONSPIRATORS
Oil on canvas, 18" x 24" (45.7 x 61cm), signed and dated Feb 8th 1942; signed and inscribed verso.

Provenance: Purchased directly from the Artist, 1943, and hence by descent.

Exhibited: Colin Middleton, Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, 1943, Opus 1, No.29 (Group III).

The Conspirators was exhibited as part of Colin Middletons first solo exhibition, held at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery (now the Ulster Museum) in September 1943. After the exhibition closed, in January or February 1944, Middleton met a friend who had returned to Belfast on leave from active service, who agreed to buy this painting, since when it has remained within the same family.[1]

Middletons 1943 exhibition has become widely-regarded as one of the most significant one-person shows in Irish art history, in part because of its scale and the extraordinary ambition of the thirty-three-year-old painter. Its 115 paintings were dominated by his striking and progressive engagement with Surrealism and abstraction, in addition to his complex analysis of Symbolism. John Hewitt wrote that the exhibition made it clear that Middleton was already our most considerable painter.[2] It also represented a powerful response to international, local and personal events of the time, with the entire exhibition all completed since the onset of World War Two.

The main part of the exhibition was divided into eight groups, and The Conspirators was part of arguably the most mystical and mysterious of these small sections, Group III. Set in a stark and pared-back landscape that recalls a series of cityscapes Middleton painted around the beginning of the war, the three female figures provide a gentle eroticism and voluptuousness that is strikingly at odds with their surroundings. Middletons work is often ambiguous and full of implied references; here, there is perhaps a re-working of the theme of the Three Graces, but it is possible that he intended the viewer to read the image in relation to the Judgement of Paris and the ensuing events of the Trojan War, and for viewers in 1942 to see a more contemporary relevance in the subtle suggestion of conflict beneath the seductive mood of the painting.

Dickon Hall, October 2024

[1] Private correspondence with the owners of The Conspirators

[2] John Hewitt, A North Light, first draft

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