Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 30TH MARCH 2022

94 74 COLIN MIDDLETON RHA RUA (1910 - 1983) Kelly’s Coal Boat, Belfast Lough Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 60.5cm (20 x 24”) Signed Provenance: Christie’s, Scotland, 27th October 1989, Lot 353 (as A Cargo Ship at Sea ) € 8,000 - 12,000 Colin Middleton’s father, Charles Collins Middleton, was a keen and skilful amateur painter who had a passion for boats and John Hewitt records Middleton’s early memories of ‘those Sunday mornings when Charles carried him down to the Belfast Docks to wander along the quays scru- tinising the array of vessels and boarding those where he was friendly with the ships’ masters’. It was in 1941, following the harrowing events of the Blitz of Belfast that spring and eight years af- ter his father’s death, that Middleton’s interest in this subject matter seems to have been re-awak- ened. Although his earlier work had been dominated by abstraction and surrealism, and the latter had been particularly effective in shaping his response to the war and also to the death in 1939 of his first wife, Maye, a more reflective mood emerged in a series of Belfast street scenes that Middleton began in 1940. In these, he seems to have looked at the city around him and its inhabitants with a new sense of kinship and empathy. It is interesting to speculate whether the paintings of Belfast Docks and its working boats were a conscious reminder of his father. The gently impressionistic manner of painting, with short bro- ken brushstrokes placed carefully onto primed canvas occasionally left bare, and the muted pal- ette that typified this group of works, is demonstrated in the present painting. A number of these Belfast landscapes and seascapes were included in Middleton’s 1941 solo exhibition at Belfast Museum and Art Gallery and it is possible that this is the painting Barges that was shown there. Dickon Hall