The Colin Middleton
Gallery at Belfast Royal Academy
Brian Metcalfe PhD
Foreword Jane Middleton Giddens
My most sincere thanks to Dr Brian Metcalfe for this unique tribute to the figure of Colin Middleton, my father. Unique given its location, at Belfast Royal Academy which I also consider very appropriate considering that in his later years, Middleton combined his artistic activities with those as a full-time teacher of art and art history.
Indeed, he spoke fondly of those years and of the satisfaction it gave him when a pupil of his would go on to study at art school or even just took to painting as a dedicated pastime. I know, too, that he was happy here at BRA, where he forged several lifelong friendships.
In his biography of Colin Middleton, the poet, art critic and historian, John Hewitt comments that Colin, in spite of not having excelled in his academic studies as a schoolboy, was “one of the best educated, and most widely and variously informed persons that I have ever known.” It would seem that his headmaster, A.R. Foster also sensed there was something exceptional about his pupil when he conserved several of the youngster’s drawings, which he later donated to the Ulster Museum.
On a personal level, I suspect that on more than one occasion, my father would have been ticked off for gazing out of the classroom window, or on the playing fields for taking his eye off the ball. I am equally sure that it would be at these moments that he was already registering the geography and geometry of his surroundings, or noting the gestures and movements of his team-mates, and how the light played on the different surfaces. If he were alive today, it would undoubtedly, give him great satisfaction to see his works hanging on the walls of his old school.
As a final note, I wish to extend my thanks and gratitude to the school’s authorities and in particular to Mrs Hilary Woods, for their collaboration and for facilitating the installation of The Colin Middleton Gallery here in one of Belfast’s most distinguished institutions.
Outside cover image, Camden Street, Winter Colin Middleton is not shown on the wall because of its large size.
Introduction
Brian Metcalfe
The idea of a Colin Middleton Gallery came to me because few people are aware Colin was a former pupil at Belfast Royal Academy and secondly, although he was one of Ireland’s most prominent artists of the Twentieth Century it is difficult to see and experience his work. Many museums and galleries across Ireland have significant Middleton collections but, regrettably, few of his paintings are on public display.
The second part of this venture arose because I wanted to recognise the contribution the school has made to me (1963-70) and my broader family including my sister, uncle and three cousins. In particular it has always meant a lot to my mother Beattie (nee Stevens). She started at the school in 1927 aged five, the same year Colin left BRA. At the time of the Gallery’s unveiling in May 2023 she is 101 and as a former President of the Old Girls’ Association can currently claim to be the school’s “Oldest Old Girl”!
I would like to thank several people who assisted in the creation of the Gallery. From the outset both Jane Middleton and Dickon Hall (author of Colin Middleton: A Study, 2001), provided outstanding support and enthusiasm. Dickon also assisted by providing notes on the interpretation of each painting.
School Principal, Hilary Woods readily embraced the concept and worked with me to bring it to fruition. Karen Reihill, curator and art historian and Charlie Minter, Head of Irish Art, Sotheby’s London kindly assisted with the paintings from private collections.
Jane Middleton and Marie Heaney graciously permitted me to arrange high resolution images of their paintings. I believe these paintings, Loughanure and Farmhouse, Co. Down enhance the wall and juxtaposed with the Heaney and Longley poems reveal an important part of the artist’s character.
Finally, I would like to thank the various galleries who willingly cooperated on the project of establishing the Colin Middleton Gallery at Belfast Royal Academy.
Colin Middleton one of Ireland’s most outstanding artists of the Twentieth Century
Colin Middleton, RUA, RHA, MA, MBE was born on January 29, 1910 at 48 Victoria Gardens, Belfast on the slopes of the Cavehill and later moved to 28 Chichester Avenue. Both parents were from England. His father Charles Collins Middleton (1878-1935), a partner in the damask design company, Page & Middleton was also a dedicated amateur impressionist artist. At his side, Colin produced his first oil painting at the age of seven.
he was able to study works by the Flemish masters. When his father died in 1933, Colin took his place as partner in the business in order to support his mother Dora. During his 20 years as a damask designer he frequently visited Belfast’s world-famous linen mills, but he also explored the surrounding streets where their workers lived. Such experiences undoubtedly inspired paintings such as “If I were a Blackbird” (1941). In 1935 he married Maye McLain, a fellow art student who later became the art teacher at Methodist College. Tragically, Maye died in 1939, the eve of the Second World War. In 1945 Colin married Kathleen Hazel Giddens. Kathleen had two daughters, Alison and Peggy from her first marriage. In 1947 Colin and Kathleen moved with the two girls and baby son John to the Middleton Murray community farm in Norfolk. Unfortunately, the move was not a success and the following year they returned to Belfast. On his return Middleton made contact with the Dublin Gallery of Victor Waddington. While Middleton was sceptical about the “gross
Colin left Belfast Royal Academy in 1927 without as John Hewitt said, “any remarkable academic success”. Hewitt also remarked that Middleton remembered with great enthusiam his daily walk to school through the Waterworks, past the upper and lower ponds. The two drawings displayed on the gallery wall, “A Street Band” and “Punt on the Isis” were donated to the Ulster Museum by the former Headmaster, A.R. Foster. Colin’s ambition was to enrol at an art college in England, but his father’s failing health meant that he was compelled to enter Page & Middleton as an apprentice. As compensation, he enrolled for evening and Saturday morning classes at the Belfast College of Art. During a family holiday in London in 1928, he visited a Van Gogh exhibition and then in 1931 he travelled to Belgium, where
Middleton in his Bangor studio 1977
Colin (far right) on a 1924/25 rugby team with Headmaster A.R. Foster a former British & Irish Lion.
artificiality of the contemporary art world”, he also recognised the need to sell his work. Waddington provided a gateway not just to the Dublin market but beyond to London, Europe and America. Middleton became part of the Waddington ‘team’ that included Gerard Dillon, Nevill Johnson and Dan O’Neill. When his mother Dora died in 1949, the Middletons moved to Ardglass.
In 1950 their daughter Jane, was born. The three to four years spent in Ardglass were fruitful and promising, but unfortunately, things changed when the Waddington Gallery relocated to London and began concentrating on the new American action painters. Middleton was then obliged to turn his hand to teaching, first as a part-time lecturer at the Belfast College of Art. Then by 1955, he had secured a full-time teaching position at Coleraine Technical College.
In 1961 Colin was appointed Art Master at Friends School, Lisburn, a post he occupied until 1970, when he was granted the Arts Council bursary subsistence award. This enabled him to dedicate his time exclusively to painting. Belfast once again became home to him and his family for the next seven years.
They made a final move to 6 Victoria Road, Bangor, where from his studio, he had a magnificent view of the harbour and Belfast Lough. Middleton died on 23 December, 1983.
Middleton was successful in having a painting selected for a series of stamps for Festival ’71, along with Tom Carr and T.P. Flanagan commemorating the 50th anniversary of Northern Ireland. In 1968 Middleton was awarded an MBE and in 1972 an Honorary Master’s Degree from Queen’s University.
Today Middleton is widely recognised as one of Ireland’s best Twentieth Century artists.
His paintings remain in many private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Ireland, Ulster Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Crawford Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, Hugh Lane Gallery, Herbert Art Gallery, Queen’s University, Birmingham University and Oxford University.
Slieve na Brock in the Mournes
Blue Plaque at Victoria Road, Bangor
The Colin Middleton Gallery
Moonlight, Ballyholme
Colin Middleton moved with his family to Bangor in 1952 after three years in Ardglass, during which he worked in an expressionist style that continued throughout the 1950s. The intense palette and energetic handling of paint in this work are typical of the period and the mood is ambiguous yet slightly melancholy, with a single figure set against a turbulent sea.
Moonlight, Ballyholme 1953 oil on canvas 50 x 75 cm CAG2783, Crawford Art Gallery Presented to the State 2012 (Allied Irish Banks)
The ‘Holy Lands’
Colin Middleton returned to Belfast in 1945 with his wife, Kathleen, and their young family, having spent a year living in Ballyhalbert, and this painting reflects both his pleasure at returning to the city and the mood of joy and exuberance at the end of the war. It has been suggested that the blank newspaper sheets flying away in the wind represent this new sense of freedom, with the news and events of the war no longer dominating everyday life.
Private Collection
26.7 x 30.5 cm
The Holy Land 1945 oil on canvas
Shipyard Family
Probably painted in Coleraine in the late 1950s, this subject seems to look back to earlier, urban subject matter, but the colourful clothing seems untypical of Belfast at this time and demonstrates Middleton’s ability to use pattern and other elements of design within the increasingly abstracted works of this transitional period.
Shipyard Family oil on canvas
Private Collection
Previously part of the David Bowie Collection
1994
30 x 30 cm
Two of Middleton’s drawings from his school days
Punt on the Isis drawing
14.5 x 22 cm
Belum U4729, Ulster Museum
A Street Band drawing
18 x 20.5 cm
Belum U4728, Ulster Museum
Middleton was taught art at BRA by Miss Dickson, who apparently encouraged drawing from the imagination, rather than from the object. Colin Middleton recorded later that he had been awarded the highest mark for art in Ulster in the Senior Certificate. The first of these drawings might be copied from an illustration, perhaps to a story, while the second is more likely to have been something he saw in Belfast.
If I Were a Blackbird
One of a series of quietly impressionistic Belfast street scenes Middleton painted around the time of the Blitz of Belfast in 1941, which deeply affected him and which seem to have inspired a sense of empathy with the often isolated figures that he drew and painted. The poet John Hewitt wrote of this work that “what gave the painting its permanent life was that trail of a song through the title, which can only be heard in the heart”.
If I were a Blackbird 1941 oil on canvas
50.7 x 61 cm
Belum U4792, Ulster Museum
Lagan, Annadale, October
Lagan: Annadale, October
Another painting completed after the Blitz that demonstrates Middleton’s affection for Belfast and his enjoyment of the aspects of daily life that continued despite recent events. Middleton often painted around Stranmillis and the Annadale Embankment at this time, and Queen’s University can just be seen in the distance.
Lagan, Annadale, October 1941/3
oil on canvas
51 x 61 cm
Belum U598, Ulster Museum
Strange Openings
This highly-stylised and abstracted treatment of a factory and houses seems to date from the early 1940s. The black windows of the factory might relate to the wartime black-out or to the black felt that was hung in the windows of one linen mill when its windows were blown out during a bombing raid. The scale and placing of the factory buildings in relation to the houses around them might indicate Middleton’s attitude towards industrialisation and its impact on the individual.
Strange Openings
oil on canvas, 50.8 x 61 cm
Irish Museum of Modern Art
Northern Village
Painted during Middleton’s time in Ardglass, when he was working with the Waddington Galleries in Dublin, Northern Village has the heightened palette, dynamic paint surface and use of impasto typical of this period in which he worked in a powerful expressionist manner. The carefully constructed pattern of related brushstrokes and the integration of the foreground trees with the buildings beyond is reminiscent of Cézanne.
Northern Village, 1949/50 oil on canvas
65.8 x 76.1 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
Purchased 1953
Loughanure
In the 1960s the Ulster landscape became the central subject of Middleton’s work, and he sought to capture both the visual effect of changing light and the underlying structure of the landscape. His palette was often darker and carefully controlled across the canvas, achieving a sense of space and gradual recession towards the horizon line.
Loughanure, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
Marie Heaney
Farmhouse, County Down
One of the last paintings completed by Colin Middleton, the simplicity of the composition and the traditional farmhouse seem to look back towards some of his earliest landscapes. The subtly integrated palette contains an extraordinary range of colour, as if he wanted a last opportunity to explore the tools of a painter.
Farmhouse, County Down 1983
oil on canvas, 46 x 61 cm
Jane Middleton Giddens
Colin Middleton tributes in poetry
Seamus Heaney
Michael Longley
Longley in his poem “White Farmhouse” describes the painting “County Down Farmhouse” which today hangs in Colin’s daughter Jane’s home in Terrassa, Spain. Jane explains how her father used all the colours in his palette in this his final painting.
White Farmhouse after Colin Middleton
Colin Middleton knew that he was dying And fitted all the colours he had ever used Into his last painting, a white farmhouse
Among drumlins, the gable and chimneys
White, the corn harvested by his palette-knife, A besmirching of corn poppy, cornflower, One blue-black spinney, triangles of sunlight
Disappearing between Octobery hedges, Another farmhouse in the distance like home. Colin Middleton was a friend of mine
When I was young. How can I count the colours?
There are no doors or windows in the building, No outhouses. I name the picture for myself. Titles, said Duchamp, are invisible colours.
Heaney dedicated two poems to his friend, “Loughanure” and “In Small Townlands”. Loughanure is a small village near Glenties in Co. Donegal. Heaney bought the painting soon after he was married and it hangs today in the family home. His wife Marie tells the story that they had earmarked the thirty pounds for a fridge and Seamus returned home with Colin’s painting instead!
In the first verse of the poem (below) Heaney describes how Colin when meeting you would narrow his eyes and size you up as if you were a canvas.
He describes the composition of the painting and mentions that when Colin visited he would gaze at his work “grunting a bit and nodding”. Reproductions of both paintings, Loughanure and White Farmhouse are displayed adjacent to this board.
Loughanure
Smoke might have been already in his eyes
The way he’d narrow them to size you up As if you were a canvas, all the while
Licking and sealing a hand-rolled cigarette, Each small ash increment flicked off As white as flecks on the horizon line
Of his painting of Loughanure, thirty guineas
Forty odd years ago. Whitewashed gables
Like petals stripped from hawthorn, heather ground
A pother of Gaeltacht turf smoke. Every time He came to the house, he would go and stand Gazing at it, grunting a bit and nodding.
