john piper, c.h. (1903-1992) - epsom...
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JOHN PIPER, C.H. (1903-1992) – DISTINGUISHED PAINTER,
WHO HELPED TO RE-ESTABLISH A SENSE OF NATIONAL
IDENTITY IN ART, ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN.
“You have saved much of England by your pictures of architecture and landscape. What is more you
have increased our vision “
.John Betjeman (1944)
While reflecting on the varied personalities of his three sons, Charles Piper once observed that his
youngest son, John: “Has very different tastes from both of the other sons...He has taken us about
the country showing us all sorts of places we should never have visited.” Charles was a successful
solicitor and the family home on Ashley Road, Epsom, was an elegant neo-Georgian villa situated in
an acre of land ‘with a stable at one side and a carriage sweep
between the two front gates,’ and it was here that John
Egerton Christmas Piper was born on 13th of December 1903
to Charles and Mary (née Matthews) Piper. He and his
brothers were all educated at Epsom College, but John found
it ‘a tough place in more ways than one, for it was populated
with rugger types and rife with bullying.’ On one occasion he
recollected being reduced to ‘absolute abject fear and
trembling’, though he added: ‘I rather loved Epsom, in a
ghastly way,’ and sixty years later he could still imitate the
frightening lurch of the headmaster (Rev. T. N. Hart-Smith) as
he walked into Big School. Although he was generally
unhappy at school, John spent much of his time in the
Holman Art Room and, in his last year, he won the drawing
prize. After school, he and fellow Epsomian, Frank Milward,
would often escape into the countryside on their bicycles to
spend time sketching. Parish church architecture had
fascinated John Piper from his earliest schooldays and it was
said that by the age of fourteen he had visited every church in
Surrey, and on one family trip to Norfolk in 1921, and while
still at Epsom, he sketched Blakeney Church (illustration).
John and his father disagreed as to a future career. Charles was an ambitious man who wanted his
three sons to join him in the family firm of
Piper, Smith and Piper at 13, Vincent
Square, Westminster, but John wanted to
go to art school. After much discussion and
argument, John agreed to work for his
father for three years, after which time he
would be free to pursue any other career
that he might choose. While working in
Westminster as an articled clerk he seized
every possible opportunity to use the lunch
hour to visit the nearby Tate and National
Galleries, where he built on his early love of
Turner. In holiday periods John Piper went
sketching and camping with his Epsom friends
Frank Milward and David Birch. They explored
Romney Marsh, later to figure in a number of his
paintings, as well as Sussex, and Cornwall where
Birch kept a horse-drawn Romany caravan at
Mullion Cove. But, with his mind clearly on other
things his career in the legal profession was short
lived, and he failed the law examinations in 1927.
Charles Piper died a short time later, and John
was now at liberty to become an artist. He
immediately enrolled at the Richmond College of
Art, followed one year later by entry to the Royal
College of Art. Following graduation in 1929 he
married fellow student, Eileen Holding, of whom it was said: “she was so Bohemian, a Renoir person
– impulsive, instinctive, natural and easy-going; while John was so very much the opposite of that,
gothic, cerebral, measured and controlled“ – but within five years the marriage failed.
John Piper first met the painter, Myfanwy Evans, in June 1932, and within months they became an
inseparable couple. Together, they founded the contemporary art journal, Axis. Although unable to
marry until John’s divorce came through they bought Fawley Bottom Farmhouse (illustration), near
Henley-on-Thames, where they were to live for over forty years. The house had long been
abandoned. It had no electricity or water and the ground floor was littered with torn wallpaper and
broken glass. They had little furniture and it was said that when the artist Alexander Calder first
visited two years after they had moved in: ‘he scavenged around for materials and made an
impromptu chair.’ Open fires heated the house which was lit with Aladdin lamps and candles, and
electricity did not arrive until the 1950s.
In 1937 John Piper first met John Betjeman, who was writing a series of county guides sponsored by
Shell-Mex. They had much in common and both had spent school holidays discovering parish
churches in country places. Betjeman immediately took to Piper and wrote ‘We realised that we
liked the same things.’ The friendship blossomed and John was soon commissioned to illustrate a
number of the county guide books. In 1940 he
was appointed an official war artist in World
War II, and the morning after the air raid that
destroyed Coventry Cathedral he produced his
famous painting of the bomb damaged ruins –
Interior of Coventry Cathedral, (illustration) – in
which he captured with searing intensity the
architectural drama created by the Blitz. It was
described in The Times as ‘all the more poignant
for the exclusion of a human element’, and
likened to ‘Britain’s Guernica.’ Other paintings
followed and scenes of devastation made John
Piper a household name. In 1941, a major
exhibition toured the country and focussed on
the work of three artists, Piper, Henry Moore
and Graham Sutherland (Epsom College 1918-
1919), highlighting this triumvirate as the
leading British artists of the time. Following the
success of this exhibition John was
commissioned by H.M. the Queen to paint a
number of views of Windsor Castle. ‘It was a
bright Sunday morning when John drove to Windsor, in 1945, to show the King and Queen his
second series of pictures. The Queen made several appreciative remarks as she looked through
them, but King George VI looked on in silence, until the rich blacks, which run like a threnody
through the series, drew from him his famous remark – “You seem to have very bad luck with the
weather, Mr Piper.”
In 1942, John Piper visited Renishaw Hall at the invitation of Sir Osbert Sitwell, who invited him to
paint the great house and its surrounding landscape. John welcomed the friendship of Osbert and
Edith Sitwell, writing in reflective mood: ‘In a sense, they answered a fairly desperate need of mine
at the time, for sophistication, for lively conversation, for some constructive and slightly abrasive
experience of literature and painting and music and indeed life, after the fairly dim public school,
and no university of my past. And they were frightfully funny. I never laughed so much as in those
early days at Renishaw.’ Further commissions followed, including one from Sir Frederick Ashton to
design costumes for his ballet The Quest, with music composed by Sir William Walton; and in 1946,
the Victoria and Albert Museum celebrated the 150th anniversary of the invention of lithography
with works by John Piper and a number of other British artists. At this time Piper, Henry Moore and
John Sutherland were the leading names in English art and the British Council enrolled them as
cultural emissaries by sending their work abroad. Paintings by John were exhibited in Paris and later
toured a number of other European capitals as well as the United States.
In 1946, John Piper started a major collaboration with Benjamin Britten. He designed the sets for all
of Britten’s most important operas ‘in this way helping to raise British opera as an art form to a new
level’. The first opera for which John designed the sets was The Rape of Lucretia with Kathleen
Ferrier playing Lucretia. First performed at Glyndebourne, the opera soon moved to London, where
Britten was delighted with the sets and commented: ‘”I cannot
say how pleased and excited I was....I think they are absolutely
masterly.” Two years later, the English Opera Group printed a
new prospectus with a cover designed by John. It boasted that
their productions of Benjamin Britten’s operas, Peter Grimes,
Lucretia, and Albert Herring had placed England ‘in the front
rank of opera-producing countries.’ While John Piper was
designing stage sets for these operas, Myfanwy was asked by
Britten to compose libretti for The Turn of the Screw and Death
in Venice. Their close association with these operas led to the
first performance of The Turn of the Screw going down in
history as an outstanding musical event, which prompted
Myfanwy to suggest: “I think it’s about emotion versus
intellect”.
Fifteen years after he had painted the devastation of Coventry
Cathedral John Piper was approached by the architect, Basil
Spence, to design the new cathedral’s Baptistry window. This
was a formidable undertaking as the window was 52 feet wide
and 84 feet in height, but after three years of working with Patrick Reyntiens, the stained glass artist,
and using about five tons of stained glass, the window was completed. The Sunday Times declared it
‘the one great sure blaze of genius in the Cathedral.’ Reyntiens commented that ‘gigantism was not
on Piper’s agenda. His preference was for smaller windows in parish churches, modest designs of
demotic interest,’ and after Coventry, Piper went on to design windows for a number of parish
churches.
In 1949, John Piper was awarded the CBE. ‘Reluctantly,’ he wrote to the Prime Minister’s Private
Secretary, ‘I must refuse the honour. This refusal is not made out of disrespect to the Order which
the Prime Minister proposes to recommend for me to His Majesty, nor out of any lack of recognition
of the kindness that prompted it. My feeling is that my own development as a painter will be best
helped by my remaining as independent as possible and by foregoing the too comforting sense of
personal achievement that such an honour would confer.’ In 1963 he was offered a knighthood but
this, as with the CBE, he politely declined. He did, however, accept Honorary Doctorates from the
Universities of Leicester (1960), Oxford (1966), Sussex (1974), Reading (1975), Cardiff (1980), and
Leeds (1985). Public recognition of the esteem in which he was held came at last on the eve of his
70th Birthday when John Piper was made a Companion of Honour. ‘About time too,’ wrote Benjamin
Britten, and it seems that at about this time in his life Piper appeared to relax, for he joined a London
club, becoming a member of the Athenaeum. However, towards the end of the 1980s John’s grasp
on life started to deteriorate and by 1988 it was apparent that he was developing dementia. He died
at Fawley Bottom Farmhouse on the 28th of June 1992, and was buried in Fawley churchyard. John
Mortimer gave the address at the funeral and later
recalled that: “The sun came out and brightened the
churchyard. The church was full of flowers from the
Piper garden and the gardens of his friends. His grand-
children read poetry, and three tall grandsons and his
youngest son carried him to his resting place beside a
sunlit field. It was all that John Piper had loved and
which he had made the subject of his art: flowers, an
English church in an English landscape. The morning of
his funeral at Fawley was a continuation of his life.”
What was John Piper really like? According to his
biographer, Myfanwy sometimes acted as a buffer
between him and the children, for he could be sharp. He
was at his best when the children took him on his own
terms, such as helping him mix his paint. Energy flowed
through him like electricity. When painting he worked at
speed and with astonishing technical control in a variety
of media. He could shoot rabbits on the run with an old
Home Guard pistol, or dismantle a car without fuss, for
he was adept at many things. To his friends it was
obvious that he never stopped working. Patrick Reyntiens, the stained glass artist who worked with
John for 35 years recalled that: ‘working with John Piper was like seeing a craft whose ambitions up
till then had been akin to those of chamber music being transformed by full-bloodied orchestration.
We were conscious of bringing stained-glass into the modern movement of painting and design and
in so doing bringing the eye of the painter to the medium. Hitherto the craft had been dominated by
line rather than blocks of colour.’ When asked about his own painting John Piper once remarked:
“The basic and unexplainable thing about my paintings is a feeling for places. Not for “travel”, but
just for going somewhere – anywhere, really – and trying to see what hasn’t been seen before.’
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