John Piper 1903-1992
A highly versatile painter of architecture, landscapes, flowers and abstracts in oil, watercolour and gouache; draughtsman, collagist, printmaker; stained glass, textile and theatrical designer; illustrator, maker of reliefs and constructions, photographer and writer. Born in Epsom, he studied at the Royal College of Art 1927-9. He exhibited at the London Group from 1931, wrote criticism for the New Statesman and The Listener from 1933, and in 1934 began to make abstract constructions, becoming a member, and subsequently secretary of the Seven and Five Society. In 1934 he met Myfanwy Evans, whom he married in 1937, and worked with her on the magazine Axis. A friend of Ivon Hitchens, John Betjeman, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Frances Hodgkins, in 1940 he worked on the Recording Britain scheme and painted scenes of war damaged churches for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, becoming an official war artist in 1944.... read more
A highly versatile painter of architecture, landscapes, flowers and abstracts in oil, watercolour and gouache; draughtsman, collagist, printmaker; stained glass, textile and theatrical designer; illustrator, maker of reliefs and constructions, photographer and writer. Born in Epsom, he studied at the Royal College of Art 1927-9. He exhibited at the London Group from 1931, wrote criticism for the New Statesman and The Listener from 1933, and in 1934 began to make abstract constructions, becoming a member, and subsequently secretary of the Seven and Five Society. In 1934 he met Myfanwy Evans, whom he married in 1937, and worked with her on the magazine Axis. A friend of Ivon Hitchens, John Betjeman, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Frances Hodgkins, in 1940 he worked on the Recording Britain scheme and painted scenes of war damaged churches for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, becoming an official war artist in 1944.
His commissions in the 1940s included a series of works of Renshaw Hall for Sir Osbert Sitwell and of Windsor Castle for HM The Queen. He continued to work widely on commissions and increasingly, on stained glass design including windows for Coventry Cathedral, 1957-61, and Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, 1963-7. He exhibited extensively, holding solo exhibitions from c.1933 in many leading London galleries and his work is represented widely in public collections including the Tate Gallery. His stage designs were commissioned for many major productions such as Benjamin Britten’s operas, Albert Herring, 1947 and Death in Venice, 1973.
Initially a landscape artist, he turned to abstraction in 1934 but by 1936 had returned to figurative painting, in particular topographical subjects. He developed a romantic idiosyncratic style which combined a range of rich, strongly contrasted passages of colour, rapidly drawn sharp lines and varied textures. In later works the detail is more abbreviated and the colour emotional and intense.
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