Colin Middleton RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983) Teresa Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 61cm (30 x 24'') Signed and further signed, inscribed and dated 'Teresa. Colin M. July 1948.' (verso) Provenance: with Victor...

Colin Middleton RHA RUA MBE (1910-1983) Teresa Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 61cm (30 x 24'') Signed and further signed, inscribed and dated 'Teresa. Colin M. July 1948.' (verso) Provenance: with Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin, 1954, where acquired by Alan Breedon Malcolm Brush, Dublin and U.S. Exhibited: Belfast, CEMA, Ulster Museum, Colin Middleton - Loan Exhibition of Paintngs, September, 1954 Dublin, Waddington Galleries, Colin Middleton Retrospective Exhibition 1939-1954, 1954, cat.no. 8 (as 'Thresa') Literature: Edward Sheehy, 'Colin Middleton', Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, April, 1950, pp.30-39 (ill.b&w.p.31) In his article in 1950 on Colin Middleton, printed in the magazine Envoy, Edward Sheehy commented that Middleton's art of that period had seen a shift. 'From being imaginative and remote, his painting has become passionately human, and its function, the transfiguration of human experience.' (p.36) Painted in 1948, Teresa, is an important work from this period of Middleton's artistic career, as signified by the fact that it was singled out for commentary by Sheehy in the 1950 article, who stated that for him, it is 'the first of Middleton's pictures to embody completely the profound change that had taken place in his work. Teresa, a young woman, haggard and bleared with overwork, is one of the anonymous victims of life, the accustomed victim of years of petty cruelties and petty tyrannies [?] Yet the picture recreates her with such warmth of pity and depth of understanding that it brings to light an obscure but abiding spiritual beauty. She becomes a real person as well as the personification of a condition made possibly only in the possession of unquestioning faith, patient hope and quiet charity. Teresa, for me, is a picture of profound spiritual meaning.' (Op.Cit., pp.36-37) In private correspondence, the artist himself commented on the present work stating 'Teresa emerged from Carrick Hill, one of the poorer Catholic districts of Belfast. If you like she may be regarded as a personification of that district. Yet the deeper motive, the underlying necessity is governed by a need to understand, to feel my way into a particular aspect of Catholic mysticism, essentially Irish: not the mysticism, specifically, of Saint Teresa nor Saint John of the Cross, but the simple mysticism, if one may dare so distinguish it, of the poor, the resigned. A state of awareness right on the threshold of the Kingdom of Heaven. The despair that can go no deeper without discovering, however briefly, the paradoxical razor's edge between that state and the ecstatic otherness of relinquishing all because one has nothing at all to relinquish.' (Op. Cit., p. 39) The present work has resided in the collection of Malcolm and Meg Brush until very recently. The Brush collection was renowned as one of the premier collections of Irish Art, which included works by le Brocquy, Yeats and Dillon among others. The collection was accumulated with the guidance of their close friend, Victor Waddington in the 1940s and 50s. Teresa is an important discovery - a tour de force by the master of human pathos.

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