In 1943 Piper received a commission to document a slate quarry inside the mountain of Manod Mawr, north Wales, where the collections of the National Gallery were sent for safe storage during the war. While the interior proved too dark to draw, Piper took the opportunity to explore the region, using John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in North Wales (1898) as his guide.

Returning to Snowdonia in the summer of 1945, he discovered and rented ‘Pentre’, a cottage halfway down the Nant Ffrancon valley, through which a river runs, and to which, at the time, there was an unmade track barely passable in winter. Piper acquainted himself with the geology of the area by reading A.C. Ramsay’s The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales (1860) and by drawing the mountains repeatedly, thereby beginning to notice how rocks near to hand often resembled the contours of those in the distance. Writing to Paul Nash in November 1945, he described a gale ‘which made the clouds whirl round the mountains in circles and lifted the water off the river in spray’, adding, ‘I hope you will see the place one day.’¹

It is likely that Rocky Sheepfold, which resembles Piper’s photographs of a drystone enclosure in the Nant Ffrancon valley, relates to the landscape near this cottage.² The painting balances topographical detail against broad washes of tone, evoking the mood of lithographs commissioned for the poetry volume English Scottish and Welsh Landscape (1944), described in a review as ‘sinister … livid and menacing’.³ To the perimeter of Rocky Sheepfold, scattered stones extrude from the grass, larger boulders shelter and form part of the enclosure. Elemental and windswept, it demonstrates an opportunistic intervention into the landscape.

¹ Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 267–8.

² John Piper, photographs of sheepfold in Nant Ffrancon, Caernarvonshire (c. 1930s–1980s), black and white negatives, Tate Archive TGA 8728/3/3/10–11.

³ English Scottish and Welsh Landscape 1700–c. 1860, verse chosen by John Betjeman and Geoffrey Taylor, with original lithographs by John Piper (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1944), The Studio (December 1944), p. 192.

Private Collection, U.S.A