Easel on the eye: The genius of John Piper

Dark, ominous clouds gathered above Windsor Castle in every watercolour George VI could see. Turning to the artist, he quipped: ‘You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’ However witty, the royal comment was perhaps a little unjustified considering when, why and who had painted the set: made during the Second World War, it was a commission from Queen Elizabeth, who wanted a record of the castle in case it was damaged by bombing. The hand that captured it belonged to John Piper (1903–92), who, as an Official War Artist, had witnessed the devastation the German air attacks wrought on Britain. It’s almost surprising that he had only limited itself to filling his skies with rain-laden clouds rather than a full-blown storm.

The wanton destruction of buildings cut Piper especially deep. ‘He loved architecture, church or town, from all periods,’ says Andrew Lambirth, who has curated the forthcoming ‘John Piper in the South Country’ exhibition at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes. It was an interest the artist had developed early. By the time he was 12, Piper, who was born in Epsom, had already visited more than 60 churches in his native Surrey and started producing his own guide books.

Although his family indulged this passion, taking him on trips across the country and abroad, they tried to steer him towards a legal career — his father was a solicitor — with little success. Eventually, he enrolled at the Richmond Art School, then the Royal College of Art, but didn’t complete his studies. ‘As an artist, he always intrigued me because he’d started out pretty much as self-taught. He had a couple of periods of art school, but they didn’t go down very well with him. He liked to discover things for himself.’

The ancient landscape he found in Wiltshire, in particular, fascinated him: Stonehenge and Avebury, the Barrows on the Salisbury Plains, the burial mounds in Silbury and Devizes, which became his favourite market town. ‘He would come here again and again and he would draw,’ says Andrew, who is speaking from an office in the old tobacco factory Piper once recorded on paper. ‘What’s so good about [him] is the combination of his ability to capture the spirit of place, the atmosphere of a landscape, but also the detail of how it looked and of the buildings on it. He was an antiquarian, he loved the history of English architecture, particularly the Picturesque.’

Yet, if one eye looked back at the past, the other was firmly trained on the future and the latest artistic developments. ‘At the beginning of his maturity, he was very aware of what [Pablo] Picasso was doing, what [Joan] Miró was doing, what [Henri] Matisse was doing and suddenly realised that he’d been making pictures that he thought looked rather old fashioned.’ It was then that he decided to pursue what Andrew calls ‘the modern ideal’, experimenting with Abstraction, making constructions of wire and wood and embracing geometry. Yet: ‘Abstraction starved him’, as Christopher Neve wrote in Country Life in 1983. ‘He was up to the minute, but he wasn’t really himself,’ explains Andrews. Soon, he returned to landscape and architecture, but brought in ‘a modernist twist’ in the form of collage elements: ‘a way of renovating the great historical tradition of British romantic painting.’ He even tried his hand at making landscape collages en plein air — no easy feat in the great British weather — including one at Stourhead, Wiltshire, in 1939, which later became the basis for his striking Autumn at Stourhead.

The Second World War started that year and Kenneth Clark, who was director of the National Gallery, put Piper forward as an Official War Artist, a role in which he captured both the changing face of the countryside — the plough breaking the ground on Salisbury Plain to grow crops — and the wreckage of the towns. Just how harrowing Piper found it becomes evident not only from the dark clouds of Windsor Castle that prompted George VI’s pithy comment, but also from his paintings of bombed Bath: ‘There’s a terrible melancholy, there’s a sadness there and there’s an anger that comes out in the colour,’ notes Andrew. He channelled his efforts in recording what was being lost and, later, in rebuilding it.

Working with Patrick Reyntiens, who fashioned Piper’s designs from glass, the man who had spent much of his youth looking at churches now tried his best to breathe fresh life into them. He started with the windows for the baptistry of Coventry Cathedral — the new bones of the church he had captured as a mutilated shell, the morning after the Luftwaffe attack of November 14, 1940. Much more stained-glass work followed, bold with colours of the hope and optimism of a country rising from its ashes. Andrew knew Reyntiens — ‘lovely old boy,’ he recalls fondly — and says that in bringing Piper’s complex visions to life, he made stained glass do ‘things it had never done before: He had to use peculiar corners and edges and different colours against each other, to try and achieve the subtlety of the Piper [designs]’. Not all their commissions were religious and among the secular was a window for the Wiltshire Museum, which encapsulated much of what the artist loved about the landscape: the standing stones, the burial grounds and treasures such as the Stonehenge Urn.

Piper’s stained glass is testament to his extraordinary creative talent. Albeit primarily a painter and draughtsman, he turned his hand to almost anything: book illustration, ceramics, textile and stage-set design, tapestry — not least at Chichester Cathedral in West Sussex — photography, even writing and editing (among others, he worked with Sir John Betjeman, with whom he used to go on ‘architectural binges’, on a few Shell Guides to English counties).

He also defied categories: he was a leading modernist who then rejected Modernism; an accurate, almost topographical recorder of the world around him, who nonetheless felt the urge to interpret what he saw; a man who remained true to his long-standing interests at the same time as embracing new ideas and ways of working. Some called him fickle, others — mostly die-hard Modernists — even a traitor to the cause, but he bore it all with pride: ‘People think it dishonest to be chameleon-like in one’s artistic allegiances. On the other hand, I think it dishonest to be anything else.’

‘John Piper in the South Country’ is at the Wiltshire Museum, Devizes, until June 7