There was no other Irish artist of his generation who placed drawing so much at the centre of his work as Colin Middleton. He regularly showed works on paper alongside paintings in galleries and the 1958 Belfast exhibition of the legendary Lewinter Frankl Collection included ten works on paper by Middleton, most of which are included in this auction, while the major Arts Council retrospective in 1976 that was selected by Middleton included a number of works on paper.

The watercolours and drawings Colin Middleton chose to exhibit, however, only revealed a part of his working on paper. While there were many independent and finished works in themselves, exploring ideas that run in parallel to his painting, from the 1930s onwards, Middleton also made small notebook drawings towards almost every completed painting, loose but very clear compositional sketches, a number of which are catalogued here. These document the ideas of his first period of work, dominated by surrealism and symbolism, which culminated in Middleton’s legendary solo exhibition at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery in 1943. There are also lyrical wartime depictions of Belfast and various landscapes, foreshadowing the strong sense of place that increasingly dominated his work.

His drawing style also reflects the shift in his work to a more expressionist style in the late 1940s, where the physical and abrupt marks match the brooding and intense subject matter, often inspired by the aftermath of World War Two and the images that emerged from those years in photographs and films. He found success with the Waddington Gallery in the late 1940s for most of a decade, but the late 1950s signalled a shift in his fortunes and his work, and his works on paper reveal the process of this move towards abstraction. As the 1960s progressed, his work softened and became less austere, so that he seemed to celebrate the landscape again rather than to dissect it. Colin Middleton never painted from life, so the landscape paintings that transmit such an immediate and shifting sense of light and atmosphere were dependent on the small watercolour and crayon sketches such as those exhibited here, subtle and pared down but full of ‘on-the-spot’ information and crucial for his process.

This is a unique opportunity to see the range and ambition of Middleton’s works on paper. Often he seems to have found greater freedom and invention working in this more informal manner and one can see ideas flow with remarkable fluidity, wit and technical skill. While the drawings and watercolours collected here do relate closely to Middleton’s paintings, demonstrating the early evolution of ideas, many also were only conceived as drawings even while they form a coherent and crucial part of his entire body of work.

Amongst this collection, formed with a discerning eye as well as a deep understanding of Middleton’s work, are works that formed part of major collections, have been included in museum exhibitions and illustrated in books on the artist, as well as studies for many of his best-known paintings. Within these works one can see every stage of his development, understand the evolution of each style and enjoy a rare and intimate understanding of the working process of one of the greatest and most celebrated of twentieth century Irish artists.

	Dickon Hall 2012