Colin Middleton MBE RHA RUA (1910 - 1983) Mother and Child - Study for EL Nene I Pencil, 19 x 13cm (7½ x 5) Dated 23 April, (19)‘75 A COLLECTION OF ten WORKS ON PAPER BY COLIN MIDDLETON MBE RHA RUA (lots 23 - 32) From the earliest stages of his career, drawing was central to Colin Middleton’s art. His training and work in the rigorous discipline of damask design was the basis of his remarkable technical skill, but it also seems to have been in drawing that Middleton’s visual imagination found its freest expression, and the ideas that dominate his paintings are often initially explored in his sketchbooks. Middleton chose to exhibit works on paper in exhibitions throughout his career, including his 1976 retrospective, and even held one exhibition completely devoted to drawings. This group of works ranges across Middleton’s career and includes many of the themes most significant to him. A number of drawings from the 1940s almost certainly relate to ideas for paintings, although only one, Harvest Moon, is identified. In various ways they explore the idea of the female archetype that remained a consistent element in Middleton’s work, associated with ideas of generation and regeneration and a harmonious relationship with the natural world. Intriguingly one drawing also suggests the Annunciation or a similar subject; Biblical references recur frequently in Middleton’s work until the late 1950s. Two drawings from the 1960s develop the idea of the female archetype, locating the landscape and the figure within the same stylised and abstracted image, creating an inventive formal ambiguity. They suggest the physical identity of certain landscapes as well as their history and mythology, and it is notable that the Drumrush drawing also includes a bird, a significant symbol for Middleton that was often used in conjunction with the female figure and that re-emerged in a series of paintings in the late 1960s. The drawings of Middleton’s wife, Kathleen, demonstrate two different aspects of his drawing, one full of subtle tonal shifts as she plays the piano, again a notable subject in Middleton’s later work, and the other a more swiftly delineated, linear study of Kate reading. They both travelled to Australia in the early 1970s as part of a trip around the world, and stayed with their daughter Alison, and the light and scale of the landscape, as well as the influence of Aboriginal art, inspired a series of watercolours and some graphic work, including this lithograph which Middleton seems to have developed from a drawing illustrated in John Hewitt’s 1976 monograph. Middleton’s interest in printmaking in the 1970s was perhaps partly due to his son John, a highly talented artist who had just returned from London where he had studied printmaking at the Royal College of Art. Middleton was arguably one of the greatest draughtsmen in Irish art, but beyond the skill and inventiveness of his drawings they also remain significant as so many of the original ideas for his paintings were explored and resolved in this form and in some cases exist only as drawings.