Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25th September 2024

54 40 COLIN MIDDLETON RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983) Girl Playing Mozart (1949) Oil on canvas, 76 x 60cm (30 x 24”) Signed; labels verso with title, one bearing artist mark in ink and dated 1949 and numbered ‘73’ € 30,000 - 50,000 Girl Playing Mozart was painted in 1949, a transformative year for Colin Middleton during which he held his first solo exhibition with the Waddington Galleries in Dublin, which immediately established him as one of the leading contemporary Irish artists. The critic of the Dublin Mag- azine wrote that “With this show, Middleton, from being just one of the more interesting of the moderns, has become a great painter”. By the winter of 1949, when he was also working on Girl Playing Mozart , Middleton was com- pleting some of his most ambitious canvases of this period, including Give Me to Drink (NMNI) and Isaiah: 54 , and Victor Waddington was planning a group exhibition to tour the United States, which would include his work. Waddington welcomed the present painting on its arrival (“The last group of works you sent down are magnificent”), and suggested sending an image of it to those selecting the American exhibition. Female figures from this period of Middleton’s work are often depicted with a suggestion of vulnerability or extreme circumstances, often on the edges of society. Instead, the present painting implies a world of some comfort and security, with a vase of flowers behind the mu- sician, who is dressed elegantly and wearing a bracelet or a watch. Music was, however, often used by Middleton to suggest powerful but elusive forces that run through lives, and the wom- an’s glance away from her sheet music, her eyes emphasised by the paint surface, hint at an inner life that is hidden from us, and perhaps only expressed through the deeper currents of the music she plays. Dickon Hall, August 2024