Rycote Chapel

In 1936 Piper had undertaken a series of articles for the Architectural Review and this work attracted the attention of John Betjeman, another contributor, who was also the general editor of the Shell Country Guides, and commissioned Piper to undertake the Oxfordshire Volume. Anthony West comments, 'This development was of considerable importance to Piper in the short term and the long, as it stimulated the revival of his topographical interests and financed an exploration and penetration of the English scene of an intensity and range that few artists have been able to undertake ... The sketchbooks, along with the impressive photographs that Piper was beginning to take at this time, show how he was revelling in this licensed resort to the sustenance that he had been deliberately denying himself in his abstract period, and make it clear that it was vital to him to be able to feed his imagination through his eye, and to incorporate his visual experience in his painting' (see John Piper, London, 1979, p. 93).
One of the photographs taken by Piper in 1937 (see A. West, op. cit, no. 47) depicts the interior of Rycote Chapel, Oxfordshire, which was built in the 15th Century by Richard Quatremayne, councillor in the service of Richard, Duke of York and later Edward IV.