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.’

Cader Idris, c.1944.

Middle Mill, Pembrokeshire. (1982)

Newchurch, Romney Marsh, Kent. (1946).

Sutton Scarsdale. (c.1942-1943)