Venice Fantasy

Details

John Piper, C.H. (1903-1992)
Venice Fantasy
signed 'John Piper' (lower right)
oil on canvas
48 x 72 in. (122 x 183 cm.)
Painted in 1974

Provenance

with Everard Read, Johannesburg.

Literature

A. West, John Piper, London, 1979, pl. 13.

Exhibited

London, Marlborough Fine Art, John Piper, September-October 1975, no. 1 (illustrated).

Special notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

Lot Essay

The present work is from a series of settings for the opera Death in Venice by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, after Thomas Mann's novella. The production was first performed by the English Opera Group at The Maltings, Snape in June 1973, and then toured to Venice, Brussels and Edinburgh, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and The Metropolitan Opera House in New York. It was subsequently revived at The Maltings and Covent Garden in 1975 and additional projections and cloths were designed.

Venice Fantasy was exhibited 'with grateful acknowledgements to Ruskin as a soft-ground etcher and to Chris Prater as screen printer' in 1975 and reproduced as a silkscreen of the same size (see Marlborough Fine Art exhibition catalogue, London, 1975, p. 1).

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