Colin Middleton, RHA (1910 - 1983) Muriel, Nov 1939 Oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm (30 x 24'') Signed Muriel is almost a companion piece to Jou Jou another painting of a single female of the same year....

Colin Middleton, RHA (1910 - 1983) Muriel, Nov 1939 Oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm (30 x 24'') Signed Muriel is almost a companion piece to Jou Jou another painting of a single female of the same year. Both share a highly finished angular style, a cool and restrained tonality and an atmosphere that conjures up an imaginary glamorously seedy backstreet world far removed from wartime Belfast. It is difficult, also, to imagine that the artist did not consciously refer from one wrk to the other in the positioning if the hand in both pictures. In many of these female figures Middleton leaves and arm, or a hand or interlocking hands to carry the eye on from the bottom of the painting, which here seems to be holding the hem of Muriel's cloak tightly aruond her. The two works were completed in 1939 but only Muriel was selected to be shown in Middelton's vast and practically comprehensive 1943 exhibition at Belfast Museum and Art Gallery. It does present a more complex arrangement of shapes, but Middleton's decision might have been based on the more obvious allusions to prostitution in Jou Jou. Perhaps he decided that to show it would generate even more moral outrage in Belfast than would the modernist styles of his paintings. Although it was exhibited in this one-man exhibition, Muriel fell outside the thematic structure by which Middleton had arranged the paintings, but it was included as one of those ''worthy of place on their individual standing'' Dicken Hall 2005

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