Colin Middleton, RHA, (1910 - 1983) Ice Cream Cart Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed Exhibited: Colin Middleton Exhibition IMMA, Jan- June 2001 Literature: 'Colin Middleton' - A Study by...

Colin Middleton, RHA, (1910 - 1983) Ice Cream Cart Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed Exhibited: Colin Middleton Exhibition IMMA, Jan- June 2001 Literature: 'Colin Middleton' - A Study by Dicken Hall, 2001, illustrated p.11 The Ice cream Cart Colin Middleton's reaction to World War II appears to occur in two parts. The footage of concentration camps and a ravaged central Europe that emerged in the post-war period provoked the emotional humanitarian outpourings of some of Middleton's greatest paintings. His immediate response to the war and the blitz in Belfast was to look inwards, and his work in the early 1940s shows an affection for Belfast life that was new in his work. These street scenes are usually sentimental in tone, with an element of pathos, and are often very specific in their location. The Ice Cram Cart belongs to this group in many ways, but has a very different mood, more fantastical and closer to Middleton's early surrealist/symbolist painting, and the non-naturalistic use of colour immediately lifts this scene from the everyday. The triangular perspective of the picture space runs forward, setting up lines from the pair of children and the cat that connect in the lower wheel spoke, so that the space tilts towards us. Dicken Hall, November 2005. (See ''Colin Middleton: A study'' by Dicken Hall, Jogg Press 2001)

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