82
65
Colin Middleton RHA RUAMBE (1910-1983)
Girl with Owl (1951)
Oil on canvas, 75 x 64cm (29½ x 25¼”)
Signed. Signed again, inscribed with title and dated February/March 1951. (AR 108)
Exhibited:
Colin Middleton Paintings 1947 - 1952
, Tooth Gallery, London,
October/November 1952, Cat. No. 14
Colin Middleton Retrospective
September 1954, organised by CEMA Belfast Museum
and Art Gallery, Cat. No. 18
Literature: John Hewitt,
Colin Middleton
, Arts Council, 1976, illustrated p.21
Girl with an Owl
belongs to the years Colin Middleton described as his ‘Ardglass / Ballymote’ period
and it exemplifies the intensely emotional but often ambiguous quality of his work at this time.While
it belongs to the same group of paintings of female figures in a landscape as
Hallowe’en
and
Girl with
Sunflowers
the presence of the bird alongside the figure connects the painting with a theme that
recurs throughout Middleton’s career.
Middleton uses the female archetype both as a part of the landscape and also, as in the present paint-
ing, as its visual embodiment. Here the use of colour connects the figure, bird and landscape, but most
striking of all is the curve of the moon that is mirrored in the eyes of the owl. This girl has her own
identity (with a suggestion that she is holding a piece of paper, perhaps a letter) but she also expresses
the sense of the primeval power and wildness Middleton finds within the landscape and the natural
world around Ardglass.The shapes and tones of her face are repeated in aspects of the owl’s head and
the bird’s claws are noticeably the same shapes as the girl’s fingers.
The bird acts almost as a familiar to the female figure in Middleton’s work, perhaps suggesting innate
connections with the natural world or else the purely spiritual aspect of womanhood. Middleton
portrays many different types of birds, but it is interesting that he returned to the subject of a girl
with an owl in the 1960s.While there are a variety of interpretations of the owl’s symbolic role in the
painting, it is possible that he intended it to suggest the girl is endowed with an instinctive wisdom
and understanding beyond the physical world we inhabit.
This is an uncompromisingly powerful image that embodies the mood of the Ardglass period and
contains many of the ideas that were central to Middleton’s work. Clearly he considered it an impor-
tant work as the painting was reproduced in John Hewitt’s 1976 monograph on the artist (along with
a preparatory study towards it) and it was also included in the original list that Middleton drew up by
hand of the works he considered for inclusion in the touring retrospective exhibition held in that year.
Dickon Hall, March 2014
€40,000 - 60,000
