Adams Important Irish Art 30th September 2015 : You can Download a PDF Version from the Bottom Menu Down Arrow Icon

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Oil on canvas, 51 x 76cm (20 x 30”)
Inscribed with title and dated 16th July 1944 verso
Exhibited: “Colin Middleton” Exhibition CEMA Belfast 1946 Cat. No. 2 under title above.
‘Contemporary Irish Pictures exhibition, Associated American Artists Galleries, 711 Fifth venue, New York, March 1947, Cat. No 43 under inscribed title
(Remnants of exhibition label verso).
Provenance: Previously in the collection of Mr and Mrs Jack Kapp
€15,000 - 20,000
This was one of three Middleton’s included in the exhibition at Associated American Artists Galleries in New York and all were lent by Mr & Mrs Jack Kapp who also lent a Daniel
O’Neill from their collection.The exhibition was chosen by Reeves Lewenthal in association with the critic Theodore Goodman. It was one of the first big exhibitions of Contempo-
rary Irish Art to take place in the United States and included Jack B. Yeats and Louis le Brocquy . Some pictures were for sale while others were on loan from private and corporate
collections.
Dickon Hall writes :-
The idea behind ‘Flower in the Wilderness: Ringneill No.1’ clearly preoccupied Colin Middleton throughout the summer and autumn of the year following his first solo exhibition in
1943 at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery. A pair of drawings survive, dated September and October 1944, which relate to the idea explored in the present painting and seem to
lead from this to ‘Flowers in Acceptance’ (also painted in 1944). While the latter work is more symbolist in mood, ‘Flower in a Wilderness’ is connected to a particular landscape and
was one of a number of works from the 1946 exhibition related to Ringneill, on the shore of Strangford Lough.
The titles of those paintings associated with Ringneill and Ballyhalbert seem to take on uplifting and regenerative qualities in the list of works in the 1946 exhibition and there is
probably a significant autobiographical reference here, as it appears that Colin Middleton met his second wife, Kathleen, when she was living in Ballyhalbert around that time. He
had been deeply affected by the death of his first wife in 1939, as well as by the outbreak of war and the blitz of Belfast, and Kathleen might have represented his escape from this
particular wilderness.
The flower is enclosed in what appears to be a shell or a hollow, rock-like casing which prefigures the found natural objects that Middleton incorporated so inventively in his later
paintings. Out of this a flower appears in lyrical, colourful forms that suggest joy as well as renewal and rebirth, in contrast to the empty and dark landscape behind.
Dickon Hall September 2015