for a joint exhibition with the Czech artist Otakar Gregor, Joan Loewenthal and Sidney Smith in aid of the war effort at the end of 1940. Middleton completed three paintings immediately after the Belfast Blitz and the trauma of the events prevented him from working for six months before his work was included in a portfolio of lithographs published by the Ulster Academy in December 1941 to raise money for rebuilding the Ulster Children's and Women's Hospital which had been destroyed in the Blitz earlier in the year. Middleton's first solo exhibition was given by the Belfast Municipal Gallery and Museum in 1943. It was the first exhibition staged at the Gallery when they re-opened after the Belfast Blitz. At the time it was the largest one-person show the gallery had staged comprising one hundred fifteen works and it was also the first solo exhibition accorded to a local contemporary artist by the gallery. In an interview with Patrick Murphy in 1980, Middleton said that these paintings represented ‘a first endeavour to harmonize the seemingly opposed and conflicting tendencies in human nature.’ Dickon Hall says of this period that “Middleton’s painting is dominated by the female form; it is only rarely that men appear in his work. In part these women reflect his experience of Belfast and the difficult conditions that so many lived through.” This can be seen in the three female figures of The Poet’s Garden (1943), and even more so in The Conspirators (1942), both of which featured in the 1943 exhibition. “The female form, pictorially and symbolically, becomes the landscape and the life force.” The Belfast exhibition was followed by his first one-man show at the Grafton Gallery, Dublin in 1944. In the following year Middleton debuted at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art where he was to return on a number of occasions, particularly in the periods 1949-55 and 1963-71. In 1945 Middleton was married for the second time, to Kate Giddens, after both had been named co-respondents at the Belfast High Court a few months earlier, in civil servant Lionel P Barr's application for a decree-nisi. The suit was undefended and the couple had costs awarded against them. In the same year Middleton returned to the Belfast Museum for a solo exhibition arranged by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. Middleton was a founding member of the Northern Ireland branch