of the Artists International Association, who showed at the Belfast Municipal Gallery in spring 1945. Other members included Joan Loewenthal, Kathleen Crozier, Pat Hicking, Trude Neu, Sidney Smith, Nevill Johnston, George Campbell and Gerard Dillon. Middleton's work was displayed in New York's Associated American Artists Galleries in 1947 with a selection of works chosen by the Dublin art critic Theodore Goodman that included paintings by his Northern contemporaries Dan O'Neill, George Campbell, Gerard Dillon and Patrick Scott. Middleton also retired from the family business that year to devote his time to painting. He had worked at the business since his Father's death in 1935. Middleton then took his wife and child to live and work on John Middleton Murry's Suffolk commune for a short period, before returning to Belfast in 1948. Although their new life in Suffolk was not a success as the family suffered from ill health, the experience of working the land was to prove a profound influence on Middleton's future work. In 1949 Middleton showed his first works at the Oireachtas, where he was to return periodically until 1977. Upon their return from Suffolk, Middleton's wife sent Victor Waddington photos of his work whereupon Waddington came to represent Middleton for a period of five years, until the Gallery faced financial hardship in 1958. It was Waddington's patronage that enabled the Middleton family to live and work in Ardglass, County Down for four years from 1949, which Middleton later described as the happiest time of his life. When his works were displayed at Victor Waddington's Dublin gallery in that same year, it acted as a springboard that opened Middleton's work to an international audience. Group exhibitions in Boston and London followed in 1950 and 1951 respectively. 1952 saw Middleton's first solo show at London's Tooth Gallery where his work had been shown in the previous year. The Studio in review of that exhibition wrote that Middleton was:"without doubt one of the few Irish painters who can claim more than local significance...His pictorial language has a poetic richness of colour, plangent and melodious, composed in strength of tones that give depth and presence." In 1953, he moved to Bangor where he designed for the Marjory Mason's New Theatre. He later designed sets for the Circle Theatre and the Lyric Theatres, including the sets for a series of WB Yeats' plays in 1970, and Sean O'Casey's Red Roses for Me