Colin Middleton RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983)
Still Life (1940)
Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'')
Signed and dated (19)'40

 

Still life was an unusual subject for Colin Middleton, and in a small way...

Colin Middleton RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983)
Still Life (1940)
Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'')
Signed and dated (19)'40

 

Still life was an unusual subject for Colin Middleton, and in a small way it bookended his career, with a number of still life paintings from the last couple of years of his life mirroring those he painted during the Second World War. This sense of the domestic is rare in his work; even Middleton’s paintings of his wife, Kate, playing the piano or knitting, are formally analytical works, rather than demonstrating an interest in objects or interiors in themselves.

One could read Middleton’s still life paintings as expressing a particularly personal sense of engagement with the day-to-day aspects of life with which his practice, beyond his constant habit of drawing from breakfast onwards, was rarely concerned. The later still life, painted in weakening health and near the end of his life, seem to suggest Middleton’s pleasure in objects that were connected with family life, while the wartime paintings, similarly, could be read as seeking to record, and in some way preserve, the normal, pleasurable facts of life that were under threat and could no longer be taken for granted.  

This work is likely to be Still Life with Buttercups, which was shown at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery in 1943, as part of Middleton’s first one-person exhibition. This much-discussed exhibition also included a number of Belfast streetscapes, painted in a similar manner with repeated, carefully-arranged brushstrokes, and a restrained, generally naturalistic palette, into which colour and highlights were expressively introduced. 

Painted around the time of the 1941 Blitz of Belfast and the death, in 1939, of Middleton’s first wife, Maye, there is a suggestion of nostalgia and pathos within these works. Alongside the fragility, there is a sense of defiance in recording this domestic scene, with the flowers in this work perhaps a signal of hope, alongside the artist’s pleasure in painting fruit that must have been rare at that time. 

Intriguingly, Jane Middleton recalled that a similarly patterned vase was still being used in the family’s house in Camden Street in the 1960s, but that the colours were different, suggesting that he had made this change so that it was more tonally appropriate for the present painting. In 1930s Belfast, there was a close connection between modernist artists and ceramicists and potters, some of whom Middleton exhibited alongside in the 1934 Ulster Unit exhibition, and it is tempting to wonder if the vase was made by one of his contemporaries.

Dickon Hall, October 2025

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