JOHN EGERTON CHRISTMAS PIPER
British 1903-1992
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John Piper was an English painter, printmaker, stained glass, tapestry and set designer, art critic and writer. He is one of the most significant British artists of the 20th century, with a career spanning 70 years. He is best known for his wartime paintings of bombed out British churches and landmarks, and his lifetime passion for documenting historic places.
Piper was born in Epsom, Surrey, the youngest of three sons of a solicitor. The area was largely rural countryside and he enjoyed exploring and sketching or painting the old churches, buildings and monuments. While Piper was still young, he began to make guidebooks of the area including both images and information.
Schooled was at Epson College from 1919 to 1922, he did not enjoy his time there and sought refuge in producing art. When he left the college, he was determined to pursue training to become an artist, however his father disagreed. Piper was persuaded to join the family law firm and even took his law articles. In the end he refused partnership in the firm and was disinherited. Now free to attend art school, he first attended the Richmond School of Art where the artist Raymond Coxon helped him prepare for the entrance exams to the Royal College of Art, which he joined in 1928. It was during his time in Richmond that he met another student Eileen Holding, who he married in 1929. Piper did not like the structure of the Royal College of Art and left before graduating at the end of the same year.
In 1931, John and Eileen Piper held a joint exhibition at Heal’s in London. In the early 1930’s John became a member of and exhibited with the London Group. During this time, he was also writing art and music reviews for several magazines and newspapers. His review of the artist Edward Wadswoth’s work led to his invitation to join the Seven and Five Society of Modernist artists, which included artists Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. This inspired Piper to experiment with new media and abstraction. He worked in collage, covered surfaces with sand and paint and placed rods over painting surfaces.
In 1935 Piper and fellow art critic Myfanwy Evans founded the art journal Axis which was dedicated to contemporary British art. They also began to document early English sculpture in British churches. He believed that the Anglo Saxon and Romanesque sculptures had similarities with contemporary art. His interest in British churches corresponded with the needs of John Betjeman who was editing the Shell Guides (a series of travel guides) and was searching for someone to work it. Piper was hired to write and illustrate the Oxfordshire guide, which focused on its rural churches. In 1938 he held his first one-man show of abstract paintings, collages and more traditional landscapes. His second one-man show at the Leicester Galleries, which contained many works of ruins, sold out. He had begun to turn away from abstraction at this time. The summer of 1941 saw Piper works exhibited alongside Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland in the historic home, Temple Newsam, in Leeds. The exhibition attracted 52,000 visitors and traveled throughout Britain
This period also held much personal upheaval in John Piper’s life. His wife Eileen left him for another artist in 1935. He moved in with Myfanwy Evans and they moved to an abandoned farm in Fawley Bottom, Chilterns. They were married two years later 1937.
At the start of World War II Piper volunteered to work deciphering aerial reconnaissance photographs for the Royal Air Force. Instead he was persuaded by Sir Kenneth Clark to become an official War artist for the War Artist Advisory Committee. By late 1940 he had persuaded the committee that he should be concentrating on painting bombed churches, which fit with his earlier interest in church architecture and monuments. He was often on the site of bombed cities as soon as possible after an air raid, in order to capture the scene before it could be cleared up. Arriving in Coventry the morning after the Coventry Blitz of November 14, 1940, he produced sketches that he converted into oil paintings that evocatively portrayed the obliteration that the German bombs caused to the Medieval Coventry Cathedral. The painting “Interior of Coventry Cathedral” was described in an article in The Times as "all the more poignant for the exclusion of a human element”. Another painting of the east end of the cathedral became a popular postcard. His interest in these bomb sites complemented the emergence of a new romanticism of the beauty of bombed ruins. He continued traveling from bombing site to bombing site, capturing the destruction that he saw. The WAAC commissioned him to paint other sites including a series of experiments on bomb shelter designs and land reclamation work. He also painted the bomb-damaged interior of the council chamber of the House of Commons.
During this time, he was also working with the Recording Britain project to paint historic sites at risk of bombing or neglect. He also received some private commissions including a series of watercolours of Blagdon Hall for Viscount Ridley, and a series of watercolours of Windsor castle and Windsor Great Park for the Royal Family. He also painted a series of paintings of Renishae Hall and Knole House.
After the war, Piper went into partnership with Patrick Reyntiens in 1950 working in Stained glass. They produced pieces for the Oundle School, Coventry Cathedral, the chapel of Robinson College, The Washington National Cathedral, the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Eton College Chapel and many windows for smaller churches as well. His work for churches led to his commission to produce a tapestry design for the high alter of the Chichester Cathedral. He also produced tapestries for Hereford Cathedral and Llandaff Cathedral.
In the 1951 Festival of Britain, Piper was commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain to make a large mural. The completed mural, The Englishman’s Home, consisted of 42 plywood panels and depicted images from cottages to castles. Through the 1950’s and beyond he continued to expand the range of his production with textile design, dust jackets for books, posters, set design for both theater, ballet and opera, and fireworks displays, the most important being for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 1977. He also continued to write books and articles on Modern Art, and to paint.
The Tate Britain held a major retrospective of Piper’s work in 1983-84. Other retrospective exhibitions have been held the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, the River and Rowing Museum, Museum of Reading and Dorchester Abbey.
John Piper died in 1992 at home in Fawley Bottom, where he had lived since 1935 with Myfanwy Evans. His works are held in major museums and collections worldwide including The Tate Britain, which contains 180 of his works, The Victoria and Albert, The Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, The National Galleries of Scotland, The Hirshhorn Museum and sculpture garden, and many others.