Colin Middleton

Robert Wilson Esq.

Dublin, Victor Waddington Gallery, Colin Middleton 1942-49, 1949, no.10;
Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, McClelland loan exhibition, 1998-2004;
Omagh, Strule Arts Centre, Collectors Choice, September 2007, with tour to Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda

Edward Sheehy, ‘Colin Middleton’, Envoy, vol. 2, April 1950, illustrated p.32;
John Hewitt, Colin Middleton, c.1975, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and An Chomhairle Ealaion, 1976 illustrated p.16;
The Hunter Gatherer: The Collection of George and Maura McClelland at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, exh. cat., Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2004, illustrated p.87

The canvas has not been lined. A small area of surface dirt to the left of the keyboard and along the right edge, only visible on close inspection. Otherwise the work appears to be in good overall condition. UV light inspection reveals a few small spots of retouching along the upper edge and along the right hand edge; also some further minor touches in the upper right hand quadrant, also near the centre of the composition and to the left of the keyboard. Held in a silver and red painted wooden framed with a thin red slip mount.
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The Toy Box was one of only eight paintings Colin Middleton completed in the year he spent at the community farm run by the writer John Middleton Murry in Suffolk. Arguably it stands alone from the group presented here and recalls Middleton’s surrealist painting of the early 1940s in its symbolism, its formal invention and the highly-finished linear manner of working.

While the symbols in these works were deliberately universal and consistent with the research of Jung and Harold Bayley, both of whom Middleton acknowledged as influences, there appear to be more personal elements in The Toy Box. The three floating frames suggest the artist himself, the keyboard is probably a reference to his wife Kathleen and one could read the hammer and sickle shape at the top of the canvas as an assertion of the socialist beliefs that had inspired them to join Murry’s commune. The concertina-like line of houses recalls the terraces of Belfast, Middleton’s home city to which he was planning to return at this time, following a difficult period in England.

Both John Hewitt and Edward Sheehy connected the figures in the painting with puppets, perhaps inspiring the title, but it is surely not a coincidence that there is a passage in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra in which Zarathustra sees a row of houses transformed to a tiny scale and asks whether a child has taken them out of his toy box. Jung had written about this passage and perhaps the reference indicates Middleton’s own disillusion at aspects of the world and at certain people around him, who seemed diminished to him following a dispiriting period in England.

Against the loss of so much that he had believed in, Middleton sets the immediate world around him in which he finds strength; his wife, his art and his political and social beliefs.

Dickon Hall