John Piper

John Egerton Christmas Piper (Order of the Companion of Honour) was an English painter, printmaker and designer of stained-glass windows, opera and theatre sets, including tapestry designs, book jackets, screen-prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics. Famous for his British landscapes, views of ruined churches, stately homes and castles, Piper is considered to be one of the most significant British artists of the 20th Century.

Born in Epsom in 1903, the youngest of three sons, his inclination to become an artist was inhibited by his father’s desire for him to join the family law firm. Following the death of his father in 1927, Piper enrolled in the Richmond School of Art and a year later the Royal College of Art, leaving without graduating in 1929.

In the early 1930s Piper exhibited with the London Group and became secretary of the Seven and Five Society which included Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. He visited Paris where he befriended Alexander Calder and visited the studios of Arp, Brancusi and Jean Hélion. Surrounded by these avant-garde artists, Piper’s work of this period reflected the trend for abstraction, but by the late 1930s he had returned to a more naturalistic style. Piper was at the forefront of the modernist movement in Britain throughout the 1930s.

Collaborations were important to Piper and fuelled his artistic output. The Shell Guides (a series of illustrated books on the British Isles) were created with the poet John Betjeman, and he produced pottery with Geoffrey Eastop. A versatile artist, Piper also wrote articles on art and architecture and designed stained glass windows for a number of buildings including Coventry Cathedral and the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

In 1944 he was appointed the Government’s Official War Artist. He undertook some private commissions which led to a commission from the Royal family for a series of watercolours of Windsor Castle and Windsor Great Park.

For the Festival of Britain in 1951, the Arts Council of Great Britain commissioned Piper to create a large mural, The Englishman’s Home, depicting dwellings ranging from cottages to castles. From 1946 until 1954, Piper served as a trustee of the Tate gallery. He was a theatre set designer including many of the premiere productions of Benjamin Britten’s operas and firework displays, most notably for the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II in 1977.

Later in the 1950s, Piper produced pioneering designs for furnishing fabrics for Arthur Sanderson & Sons Ltd and for David Whitehead Ltd, as part of a movement to bring art and design to the masses. Piper designed five textile patterns for the 1960 centenary celebrations of Arthur Sanderson & Sons Ltd. An example of each is held in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s 20th Century Textiles & Fashion Archives. These fashionable fabric designs were richly coloured screen-prints on ‘Sanderlin’, a slightly satanised cotton furnishing fabric. The production of such large screen-prints was an extremely time consuming and skilled process as separate colours and blocks were applied to the fabric. With the passing of time, these Piper designed fabrics are difficult to find, especially in good condition.
The artwork for sale is of the popular fabric ‘STONES OF BATH’ , an example of which was exhibited in the John Piper retrospective exhibition held in the Tate Gallery in 1983. The 60 year old fabric’s colours are vibrant, is in good condition framed in oak behind conservation glass. The artwork is weighty and comes supplied with strong wall fixings.