Arts
Council Collection Artists
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Black Madonna
Colin Middleton (b.1910, Belfast. d.1983, Bangor, Co. Down)
Oil on Board
H: 90, W: 90 cms
The son of a damask designer, Colin Middleton served an apprenticeship in the linen trade while attending evening classes as Belfast School of Art under Newton Penprase. His fellow students there included William Scott, F E McWilliam and Romeo Toogood. He worked as a textile designer and then became an art teacher, working at Coleraine Technical College and Friends’ School, Lisburn. Noted for his experimentation in painting, his first one-man exhibition in 1943 comprised over a hundred paintings of astonishing variety. In 1969 he was awarded an MBE and in 1972 Queen’s University, Belfast conferred an honorary MA. In 1976 the Arts Councils of Ireland organised a major exhibition of his work comprising nearly 300 works. John Hewitt said of Middleton ‘I do not hesitate to describe him as the most various and imaginatively endowed of Irish painters, past or present’.
