Artist     John Piper
Title      Hautbois Church
Date      1960's
object    Print
Media    screenprint
Size       44.1 x 62.4cm
Ref          147

Purchased in the 105th RWA Annual Exhibition in 1957

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Hautbois Church
John Egerton Christmas Piper CH was born in December 1903 in Epsom, the son of a solicitor, and was educated at Epsom College, the Richmond School of Art and then the Royal College of Art in London. He joined the London Group and the Seven and Five Society in the mid-1930’s. In the Second World War, in 1940, he became an Official War Artist and chronicled images of destroyed buildings, in particular the devastation of Bath and destroyed churches in central Bristol.

He is chiefly known as a painter of architectural subjects but he was also a willing collaborator, working with many others including the poet and author John Betjeman (on the Shell Guides series of guidebooks on the British Isles), the potter Geoffrey Eastop and the artist Ben Nicholson. His work is focused mainly on the British landscape, especially churches, cathedrals and grand houses. Like many artists of his generation, he also worked in the applied arts, designing the stained glass windows for the new Coventry Cathedral and creating tapestries for Chichester Cathedral. He was also a set designer for the theatre, including the Kenton Theatre, his local theatre in Henley, and for the Royal Opera House production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. He wrote extensively producing many books and articles, he co-founded (with his wife Myfanwy) the avant-garde art journal Axis.

The work in the RWA Collection is typical of Piper’s approach to describing architectural subjects, displaying his inventive approach to mark-making and ability to create a lively and animated the picture surface. Piper’s keen understanding of design is based on his experience in creating non-figurative paintings. He largely withdrew from abstraction early in his career and concentrated on a more naturalistic but very distinctive approach to image-making, writing of his approach to figuration that “Abstraction is a luxury that has been left to the present day to exploit. Abstraction is the way to the heart — it is not the heart itself.”

Piper’s work is widely available in public and private collections. 182 of his works are in the Tate Britian collection. These range in style from etchings to some abstract works. Major retrospective exhibitions have been held at Tate Britain (1983-84) the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Imperial War Museum, London.

Having established himself as a major British painter and printmaker, who lived for many years at Fawley Bottom near Henley-on-Thames, John Piper died on 28th June 1992.

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