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Lot Essay
This painting was shown in the 1994 exhibition 'John Piper - A Retrospective: Works from the Artist's Studio' (Waddington Galleries in association with James Kirkman, Cork Street London W1, 12 Jan - 5 Feb 1994 - cat no 36, with full colour illustration).
The composition of the present work is very closely related to Piper's design for the stained glass window which is installed in Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes, Wiltshire, UK (formerly known as Devizes Museum). A similarly composed mixed-media drawing, described as the 'cartoon' for the window and dated to 1981, is illustrated on p.132-133 of Richard Ingrams and John Piper, 'Piper's Places: John Piper in England and Wales' (Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press, London 1983). At least one other smaller, related work in mixed media and collage is known to exist.
John Piper's long standing interests in Devizes and the ancient landscapes surrounding this historic town are reflected in his illustrated article 'A Topographical Letter from Devizes' (Cornhill Magazine 963, November 1944, p.190-195) and his co-authorship (with J H Cheetham) of the 'Shell Guide to Wiltshire' (1968 edition). Describing Piper's window design, and quoting from the 1944 article, Ingrams writes:
"In 1981 Piper himself was able to contribute to the pleasant jumble of Devizes when the town's museum installed a stained glass window designed by him, illustrating a number of Wiltshire archaeological themes. It was an appropriate gesture from an artist who had earlier paid tribute to the museum and the tradition of the Wiltshire archaeologists that it maintained 'the fading tradition of the specialist who is also a man of wide learning and culture, the man who can treat his subject scientifically without losing hold of the main romantic threads that connect it with life' ". In fact Piper's decision to depict local archaeological finds against an appropriate landscape background may have been directly influenced by an early nineteenth century painting 'Finds from a Round Barrow at Winterslow, Wiltshire' (1814) by one such 'specialist', a Mr Guest of Salisbury. Guest's painting had been illustrated in colour, along with an unrelated mixed-media drawing by Piper, in the volume Early Britain by J. Hawkes (Britain in Pictures series, London 1946).
S.L.
The composition of the present work is very closely related to Piper's design for the stained glass window which is installed in Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes, Wiltshire, UK (formerly known as Devizes Museum). A similarly composed mixed-media drawing, described as the 'cartoon' for the window and dated to 1981, is illustrated on p.132-133 of Richard Ingrams and John Piper, 'Piper's Places: John Piper in England and Wales' (Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press, London 1983). At least one other smaller, related work in mixed media and collage is known to exist.
John Piper's long standing interests in Devizes and the ancient landscapes surrounding this historic town are reflected in his illustrated article 'A Topographical Letter from Devizes' (Cornhill Magazine 963, November 1944, p.190-195) and his co-authorship (with J H Cheetham) of the 'Shell Guide to Wiltshire' (1968 edition). Describing Piper's window design, and quoting from the 1944 article, Ingrams writes:
"In 1981 Piper himself was able to contribute to the pleasant jumble of Devizes when the town's museum installed a stained glass window designed by him, illustrating a number of Wiltshire archaeological themes. It was an appropriate gesture from an artist who had earlier paid tribute to the museum and the tradition of the Wiltshire archaeologists that it maintained 'the fading tradition of the specialist who is also a man of wide learning and culture, the man who can treat his subject scientifically without losing hold of the main romantic threads that connect it with life' ". In fact Piper's decision to depict local archaeological finds against an appropriate landscape background may have been directly influenced by an early nineteenth century painting 'Finds from a Round Barrow at Winterslow, Wiltshire' (1814) by one such 'specialist', a Mr Guest of Salisbury. Guest's painting had been illustrated in colour, along with an unrelated mixed-media drawing by Piper, in the volume Early Britain by J. Hawkes (Britain in Pictures series, London 1946).
S.L.