Adam's Important Irish Art 27th March 2019

68 64 COLIN MIDDLETON RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983) The Ventriloquist Oil on canvas, 61 x 76cm (24 x 30’’) Signed ‘Colin M’, inscribed with title and dated October 1947 verso, together with the number ‘4’ Provenance: Private Collection, Dublin. ‘The Ventriloquist’ , painted in October 1947, was one of probably only eight canvases Colin Middleton completed during the year he spent at John Middleton Murry’s community farm in Thelnetham, on the border of Suffolk and Norfolk. During this period Middleton was moving gradually towards a new manner of working, away from a more precisely drawn and high- ly-finished surface towards a powerfully expressionist style that responded to the angst and uncertainty of the post-war world. ‘The Ventriloquist’ expresses Middleton’s anger at inequality and poverty, as well as responding to the vulnerability of people dispossessed by the war. Like ‘Lazarus’, completed earlier in the same year, this is a painting driven by a political or social narrative and it demonstrates the universality of Middleton’s vision. The expres sive distortions of form and emotive use of colour, heightened through a rhythmically agitated paint surface, look forward to the style that would domi- nate Middleton’s work from the summer of 1948 for over a decade. It is interesting to compare ‘The Ventriloquist’ with ‘The Promised Land’, painted in the same month, in which two figures are set against an apparently hostile, barren landscape. While the former clearly sets out Middleton’s political principles and his sympathy for those without a voice and on the edges of society, the latter also indicates the more implicit narrative of the figure paintings he was about to embark on, in which anger and doubt are often balanced by suggestions of hope, spiritual strength and the power of redemption. Dickon Hall, February 2019 € 30,000 - 40,000