Beschreibung:

Artist: Colin Middleton RUA RHA (1910-1983) Title: Ship at Anchor, Bangor Bay (1978) Signature: signed with monogram lower right, titled and dated 1978 verso Medium: oil on canvas Size: 61 x 61cm (24 x 24in) Framed Size: 79.2 x 79.2cm (31.2 x 31.2in) Provenance: Private Collection Exhibited: (probably) 'Colin Middleton and Bangor', North Down Museum, 2012 a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} In 1973, Colin Middleton moved to Bangor, where he lived and painted at 6 Victoria Road, a few steps from the town's harbour. As a child, Middleton had frequently explored Belfast Docks with his father, and during the war he had occasionally made paintings of marine subjects. This interest continued... Read more Colin Middleton Lot 29 - 'Ship at Anchor, Bangor Bay (1978)' Estimate: €12,000 - €18,000 In 1973, Colin Middleton moved to Bangor, where he lived and painted at 6 Victoria Road, a few steps from the town's harbour. As a child, Middleton had frequently explored Belfast Docks with his father, and during the war he had occasionally made paintings of marine subjects. This interest continued during the years he was living in Ardglass in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he completed a number of dramatic seascapes, in addition to some canvases documenting the bustling activity of life based around the fishing fleet. Middleton's later seascapes, mostly painted in the mid-1970s, are often more precisely derived from specific views out to Belfast Lough from Bangor than Ship at Anchor: Bangor Bay, where the title is the only certain clue to its location. Calmer and less energetic than the Ardglass works, the present painting is more concerned with highly reduced abstract arrangements based around boats and patterns in the water, as well as subtle tonal shifts across the canvas. The receding horizontal bands of blue that stretch out to the large, anchored ship on the horizon are also a feature of Middleton's later landscape paintings, while the ship forms a connecting triangle with the buoys and coloured sails on the right of the composition. By the late 1970s Middleton was recognised as one of the most significant living Irish artists, after the success of his major 1976 retrospective at the Ulster Museum and the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, yet even if the mood of this painting is peaceful, it demonstrates the artist's continual experimentation with the elements of his art as well as the connections between apparently diverse periods of his career. Dickon Hall, September 2023