Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 12th November 2018

104 87 Colin Middleton RUA RHA (1910-1983) The Garry Bog, Portrush (1958) signed lower centre, titled and dated August 1958 on reverse oil on canvas 51 x 76.5cm (20 x 30in) Provenance: John Magee Gallery, Belfast (label verso); Private Collection Exhibited: Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, October 1958, Paintings by Colin Middleton, catalogue number 14; John Magee Gallery, Belfast, November 1962, Colin Middleton: Paintings 1940- 1962, catalogue number 31 (exhibited as The Garry Bog I) €10,000-€15,000 (£8,928-£13,392) The second half of the 1950s was a time of transition for Colin Middleton in a number of ways. After six intense years, he and his dealer Victor Waddington had stopped working together in 1955 and that year Middleton took a job as art master at Coleraine Technical College. Having exhibited successfully in Dublin, London and America in the early 1950s, Middleton now had no outlet for his paintings for several years, although he continued to work regularly. The north coast provided a very different landscape from that of County Down, which had inspired many of the works shown with Waddington, and this move turned out to be as liberating and as influential as the move to Strangford had been in 1949. Middleton was always extremely sensitive towards individual places, respond- ing not only to their visual appearance but also to mood, a particular effect of light or weather and even to aspects of the physical and geological structure. The development of Middleton’s work in the late 1950s is a revealing insight into the transition from the colourful expressionist paintings that preceded them to the more austere and abstracted manner that dominated the 1960s. The Garry Bog, based on an area just outside Ballymoney, demonstrates the meeting-point of these styles. It retains the energetic paint surface of earlier works, with rhythmically swirling brush- strokes in the foreground and dabs of dramatic autumnal colour, while introducing a more stylised treatment of the sky and using repeated simplified forms of turf and rocks to lead the eye through to the high-toned fields on the horizon. The new direction in Middleton’s work was demonstrated in two substantial solo exhibitions, his first with Ritchie Hendriks in Dublin in 1958, and an exhibition with the Magee Gallery in 1962; the present painting was included in both of these. Dickon Hall, October 2018