John Piper (artist)
John Egerton Christmas Piper CH was an English painter, printmaker and designer of stained-glass windows and both opera and theatre sets. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches and monuments, and included tapestry designs, book jackets, screen prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics. He was educated at Epsom College and trained at the Richmond School of Art followed by the Royal College of Art in London. He turned from abstraction early in his career, concentrating on a more naturalistic but distinctive approach, but often worked in several different styles throughout his career.
Piper was an official war artist in World War II and his wartime depictions of bomb-damaged churches and landmarks, most notably those of Coventry Cathedral, made Piper a household name and led to his work being acquired by several public collections. Piper collaborated with many others, including the poets John Betjeman and Geoffrey Grigson on the Shell Guides, the potter Geoffrey Eastop and the artist Ben Nicholson. In his later years, he produced many limited-edition prints.
Biography
Early life
John Piper was born in Epsom, Surrey, the youngest of three sons of the solicitor Charles Alfred Piper and his wife Mary Ellen Matthews. Charles Alfred Piper's father, Charles Christmas Piper, had taken over the family bootmaking business, and was also a partner in a printing and stationery company. During Piper's childhood, Epsom was still largely countryside. He went exploring on his bicycle and drew and painted pictures of old churches and monuments on the way. He started making guide books complete with pictures and information at a young age. Piper's brothers both served in the First World War and one of them was killed at Ypres in 1915.John Piper attended Epsom College from 1919. He did not like the college but found refuge in art. When he left Epsom College in 1922, Piper published a book of poetry and wanted to study to become an artist. However, his father disagreed and insisted he join the family law firm, Piper, Smith & Piper in Westminster. Piper worked beside his father in London for three years, and took articles, but refused the offer of a partnership in the firm. This refusal cost Piper his inheritance but left him free to attend Richmond School of Art. At Richmond, the artist Raymond Coxon prepared Piper for the entrance exams for the Royal College of Art, which he entered in 1928. While studying at Richmond, Piper met Eileen Holding, a fellow student, whom he married in August 1929.
1930s
Piper disliked the regime at the Royal College of Art and left in December 1929. Piper and his wife lived in Hammersmith and held a joint exhibition of their artworks at Heal's in London in 1931. Piper also wrote art and music reviews for several papers and magazines, notably The Nation and Athenaeum. One such review, of the artist Edward Wadsworth's work, led to an invitation from Ben Nicholson for Piper to join the Seven and Five Society of modern artists. In the following years Piper was involved in a wide variety of projects in several different media. As well as abstract paintings, he produced collages, often with the English landscape or seaside as the subject. He drew a series on Welsh nonconformist chapels, produced articles on English typography and made arts programmes for the BBC. He experimented with placing constructions of dowelling rods over the surface of his canvases and with using mixtures of sand and paint.With Myfanwy Evans, Piper founded the contemporary art journal Axis in January 1935. As the art critic for The Listener, through working on Axis and by his membership of the London Group and the Seven and Five Society, Piper was at the forefront of the modernist movement in Britain throughout the 1930s. In 1935 Piper and Evans began documenting Early English sculptures in British churches. Piper believed that Anglo-Saxon and Romanesque sculptures, as a popular art form, had parallels with contemporary art. Through Evans, Piper met John Betjeman in 1937 and Betjeman asked Piper to work on the Shell Guides he was editing. Piper wrote and illustrated the guide to Oxfordshire, focusing on rural churches. In March 1938 Stephen Spender asked Piper to design the sets for his production of Trial of a Judge. Piper's first one-man show in May 1938 included abstract paintings, collage landscapes and more conventional landscapes. His second in March 1940 at the Leicester Galleries, featuring several pictures of derelict ruins, was a sell-out.
Piper had first met Myfanwy Evans in 1934 and early the next year when his wife Eileen left him for another artist, Piper and Evans moved into an abandoned farmhouse at Fawley Bottom in the Chilterns near Henley-on-Thames. The farmhouse had no mains electricity, no mains water and no telephone connection. They married in 1937. They gradually converted the farm's outbuildings to studios for their artworks, but it was not until the 1960s that they could afford to modernise the property.
World War II
At the start of the Second World War, Piper volunteered to work interpreting aerial reconnaissance photographs for the Royal Air Force, but was persuaded by Sir Kenneth Clark to work as an official war artist for the War Artists' Advisory Committee, which he did from 1940 to 1944 on short-term contracts. Piper was one of only two artists, the other being Meredith Frampton, commissioned to paint inside Air Raid Precaution control rooms. Early in 1940 Piper was secretly taken to the ARP underground centre in Bristol, where he painted two pictures.In November 1940 Piper persuaded the WAAC committee that he should be allowed to concentrate on painting bombed churches. This may have reflected his pre-war conversion to the Anglican faith as much as his previous interest in depicting derelict architectural ruins. The terms of this commission meant Piper would be visiting bombed cities, and other sites, as soon as possible after an air raid: often "the following morning, before the clearing up". Hence he arrived in Coventry the morning after the Coventry Blitz air raid of 14 November 1940 that resulted in 1000 casualties and the destruction of the medieval Coventry Cathedral. Piper made drawings of the cathedral and other gutted churches in the city which he subsequently worked up into oil paintings in his studio. Piper's first painting of the bombed cathedral, Interior of Coventry Cathedral, now exhibited at the Herbert Art Gallery, was described by Jeffery Daniels in The Times as "all the more poignant for the exclusion of a human element". Piper's depiction of the east end of the cathedral was printed as a post-card during the war and sold well. In 1962 the same image was used on the cover of the official souvenir guide to the cathedral.
After the bombing raids of 24 November 1940 on Bristol, Piper arrived in the city a day, or possibly two, later. Piper only spent a few hours in the city, but his sketches resulted, by January 1941, in three oil paintings of ruined churches: St Mary-le-Port, Bristol, The Temple Church and The Church of the Holy Nativity. Piper also painted bombed churches and other buildings in London and Newport Pagnell, and also spent a week painting in Bath after the Bath Blitz air raids in April 1942. During the summer of 1941, Piper featured in a group exhibition with Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland at Temple Newsam in Leeds. The show was a great success, attracting some 52,000 visitors before touring to other English towns and cities.
In 1943, the WAAC commissioned Piper to go to the disused slate mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog where the paintings from the National Gallery had been evacuated for safety during the Blitz. Piper found conditions in the underground quarry too difficult to work in but did paint some landscapes in the immediate area. He also toured North Wales by bicycle, cycling and climbing to photograph and sketch buildings and views in Harlech, in the Vale of Ffestiniog, on Cader Idris and on Aran Fawddwy. Piper had previously visited Snowdonia in 1939, 1940 and 1941, and often returned there after the war.
Piper was also commissioned by the WAAC to record a series of experiments on bomb shelter designs and land reclamation work. Alongside Vivian Pitchforth, he painted the bombed interior of the House of Commons. In July 1944 the WAAC appointed Piper to the full-time artist post vacated by John Platt at the Ministry of War Transport. In this role Piper painted rail and marine transport scenes in Cardiff, Bristol, Southampton and other south-coast locations. Earlier in the war, he had also painted at the locomotive works in Swindon.
Throughout the war Piper also undertook work for the Recording Britain project, initiated by Kenneth Clark, to paint historic sites thought to be at risk from bombing or neglect. He also undertook some private commissions during the war. Viscount Ridley commissioned him to produce a series of watercolours of Blagdon Hall and this led to a commission from the Royal Family for a series of watercolours of Windsor Castle and Windsor Great Park, which Piper completed by March 1942. The King, George VI was unimpressed with the dark tone of the pictures and commented, "You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper".
Sir Osbert Sitwell invited Piper to Renishaw Hall to paint the house and illustrate an autobiography he was writing. Piper made the first of many visits to the estate in 1942. The family retain 70 of his pictures and there is a display at the hall. Piper painted a similar series at Knole House for Edward Sackville-West. In 1943, Piper received the first of several poster commissions from Ealing Studios. His draft poster for the film The Bells Go Down featured a view of St Paul's Cathedral seen among monumental ruins.
Stained glass work
From the early 1950s Piper began working in stained glass in partnership with Patrick Reyntiens, whom he had met through John Betjeman. Their first commission was for three windows for the chancel of the Chapel at Oundle School in Northamptonshire. Completed between 1953 and 1956, the nine lights, three to each window, feature individual images of Christ as King and Savior of the World. Setting the pattern for a partnership that would last into the 1980s, a closely collaborative process in which Piper provided the designs that Reyntiens would realize in glass.The success of the Oundle windows led directly to Basil Spence commissioning Piper and Reyntiens to design the stained-glass window for the baptistry of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. Spence's vision for the new cathedral required that it be filled with the best examples of modern British art, like a "casket of jewels". Between 1955 and 1962, in collaboration with Spence, Piper and Reyntiens produced an original curtain of glass and reinforced concrete that climbs the full 26 meter height of the bowed baptistry wall. Architecturally integral to the building, it comprises 198 panes of glass, each combining to form an abstract design in a spectrum of colours ranging from white to deep blue. It remains Piper's single most celebrated work of art.
Piper's depiction of Jesus at Emmaus was installed above the high altar at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff in 1962, a commission received while working on the Coventry window. Commissions followed throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, primarily from patrons of memorial windows in parish churches across England. At St Andrew's Church, Plymouth, Piper and Reyntiens were responsible for six windows, each individual and all installed between 1957 and 1968.
Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, built between 1962 and 1967 by the architect Frederick Gibberd features, as an integral part of its design, an innovative stained glass lantern. Known as the Crown of Glass this was designed and manufactured by Piper and Reyntiens. The lantern panels were cemented together with epoxy resin within thin concrete ribs, a technique invented for the job. The idea for the design came from Reyntiens, who was inspired by a description from Dante's Paradiso of the Holy Trinity as "three great eyes of different colours each one winking at the other."
One of Piper's most original window commissions is not actually fabricated from glass at all. At the Church of All Saints, Clifton in Bristol, in 1967, Piper created windows depicting the Tree of Life, the River of Life and Creation from fiberglass panels specially created by Gillespie Associates in Farnham to Piper's specification. Once in situ, Piper poured resins onto the panels creating large coloured sections without the use of ‘leads’ used in traditional stained glass. Piper described the process as akin to painting on canvas.
As well as their work for cathedrals and parish churches, Piper and Reyntiens also designed stained-glass windows for Eton College Chapel, the chapel of Nuffield College, Oxford, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and the chapel of Robinson College, Cambridge.
Piper's and Reyntiens’ most significant overseas commission is installed in the narthex of Washington National Cathedral, a three-light window featuring the Tree of Life, a motif frequently deployed by Piper. It was unveiled in September 1974 as part of the dedication of the narthex beneath the Cathedral's south-west tower to the memory of Sir Winston Churchill. The title given to the window is The Land Is Bright, taken from the final stanza of Arthur Hugh Clough's 1849 poem, Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth, which was quoted by Churchill in a 1941 radio broadcast.
Piper and Reyntiens also undertook secular commissions in glass. Of particular note is the abstract glazed screen produced for Arthur Sanderson's new showroom on Berners Street in London in 1960. Back lit, its purpose is to disguise the lift shafts. The screen was retained and restored when the building was converted into a hotel in 2000.
In total, Piper designed over 60 stained glass window commissions. The majority were undertaken in partnership with Reyntiens, though in later years Piper worked with David Wasley and Joseph A Nuttgens, both of whom had trained in Reyntiens' studio. Piper's last major commission – though not his last to be manufactured and installed – was his 1984 memorial window to his former collaborator, Sir John Betjeman in All Saints Church at Farnborough in Berkshire.