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33

Colin Middleton RHA (1910-1983) THE QUEEN OF SPAIN’S DAUGHTER signed lower right; inscribed, sign...

Currency:EUR Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:25,000.00 - 35,000.00 EUR
Colin Middleton RHA (1910-1983) THE QUEEN OF SPAIN’S DAUGHTER signed lower right; inscribed, sign...
Colin Middleton RHA (1910-1983)
THE QUEEN OF SPAIN’S DAUGHTER
signed lower right; inscribed, signed in monogram and dated [1972/1974] on reverse
oil on board
43 by 43cm., 17 by 17in.
Provenance:
Tom Hunter collection, Belfast
Taylor Gallery, London
Private Collection, Co. Fermanagh
Exhibited:
"Annual Exhibition of Irish Art", Taylor Gallery, London, 1 June - 30 July, 1993, catalogue no. 8 (illustrated)
No. 28 in Middleton's "Wilderness Series".
The obvious source for the title of this painting would seem to be the Elizabethan nursery rhyme ‘I had a little nut-tree’, which refers to the ‘King of Spain’s Daughter’, Juana of Castile, who visited the court of Henry VII in 1506, and who has gone down in history as being ‘mad’. In the 1970s Colin and Kate Middleton paid a number of visits to Barcelona to see their daughter Jane, and references to Spain, its landscape, lifestyle, customs and history permeate his work in that decade. The transformation from King to Queen in the title is presumably deliberate, and might reflect the dominance of the female figure in these late Wilderness paintings, and indeed throughout Middleton’s work.
The hint of the nursery rhyme within the title sets a certain mood for the picture. We may be intended to read the solitary wandering figure as Juana on her travels, tolling a hand-bell and surrounded in her madness by a bright yet stark desert landscape, interrupted only by rugged mountains in the distance. One could speculate on the introduction of an autobiographical element that occurs in a number of the Wilderness paintings, the roll of elaborately patterned material trailed by this figure that harks back to Middleton’s early training to make designs for damask. She is weighed down by the fabric, struggling in a hostile mental landscape.
Dickon Hall, Killinchy, October 2002.
Dickon Hall is the author of Colin Middleton: A Study, JOGA Press, Belfast, 2001.
€25,000-€35,000 (IR £19,500-£27,300 approx.)
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