Lot 19 Colin Middleton WOMAN WITH JUG: VILANOVA

Colin Middleton RHA, RUA, MBE, 1910-1983
WOMAN WITH JUG: VILANOVA
Oil on canvas, 36" x 36" (91.4 x 91.4cm), signed; signed, inscribed and dated 1982 verso.

For the last decade of his life, travel was an invigorating force for Colin Middleton that permeated many aspects of his painting. Visits to two of his daughters, Peggy in Australia and Jane in Barcelona, helped transform Middleton's palette from the muted tones that often characterised his work in the 1960s, to vibrant primary colours, with strong tonal contrasts. These journeys to new places also stimulated a sense of the fantastic in Middletons creative process, bringing elements of surrealism back into his work, as he found inventive ways to interpret the places and scenes he saw.

By the 1980s Middleton was regarded as one of the leading Irish painters of the time, a position firmly established by an extensive retrospective exhibition held in 1976 in Belfast and Dublin. This included a number of recent paintings and there was a broad critical consensus that he remained at a creative peak. Woman with Jug: Vilanova is one of the last paintings Middleton completed and was clearly inspired by one of his visits to Barcelona, during which he would draw prolifically to record striking visual images.

Middletons late works often seem to return to aspects of visual or technical ideas he had originally explored in the 1960s and 1970s. The suggestion of incision in the linear passages of this painting, recalls some of his works of the 1960s, where there was actual incision into the paint surface, as well as the work of modern British artists such as Victor Pasmore and Ben Nicholson, both of whom Middleton admired. The ambiguity between figure and landscape in the flattened, linear description of form, runs throughout Middletons painting, and the suggestion of mountains in the present work recalls the powerful impression that the hills around Barcelona, and in particular the mountain of Montserrat, made on him during his visits.

While, in some compositional mannerisms, the figure looks back to Middletons female archetypes of the 1960s, as well as figures in some of the Wilderness and Westerness paintings, the mood here is one of relaxation and indulgence, with the artists recollection of a particular moment evoked through Middletons artistic innovation and experimentation, which continued even into his last paintings.

Dickon Hall, October 2024