John Piper, C.H.

The Artist's Estate
Jonathan Clark, London, whence acquired by the present owner's family

The work is on wove paper and the sheet has been laid down onto a piece of card. The top and left edges of the sheet are deckled and slightly dirty. The sheet is slightly dirty in the upper left quadrant. The paint is in good overall condition. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held behind glass and presented in a cream mount within a gilded frame.
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After leaving Kingswood School in Epsom in 1922, John Piper joined his father's solicitor's firm in Westminster. It wasn't until the death of his father in 1927, however that Piper finally abandoned law and enrolled at Richmond School of Art. Later that year he had his first exhibition at the Arlington Gallery, where he exhibited purely graphic work. Piper subsequently moved on to the Royal College of Art in 1928, where he remained for a year. Emerging as an independent artist without a diploma, he began to consolidate his earnings from his artistic career with work as an art critic for Saturday Review, Nation and Athenaeum and The Listener.

One of these reviews, published in December 1933 on the work of Edward Wadsworth, caught the eye of Ben Nicholson. Nicholson, impressed by Piper's writing, invited Piper to join the 7 and 5 Society and become the Society's Secretary. Piper first exhibited with the Society in March 1934, and when they decided that the following exhibition should be entirely abstract, Piper went to Paris in June 1934 with an introduction from Nicholson to a number of artists working there, such as Jean Hélion and Alexander Calder. On his return Piper began to develop towards greater abstraction.

Painted in 1932, the present work holds particular significance as a painting produced in the early stages of Piper's development, before he embraced total abstraction for the first time. It also exists as a precedent for many facets of Piper's artistic career which would develop over the subsequent decades. The bold use of colour and primitive style owe much to the images of works by Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse which Piper pored over in Cahiers d'art in the early 1930s, before he had seen the works in the flesh in Paris in 1934. The combination of genres: still life, landscape and architecture are seamlessly combined in the present work, pointing towards the many different subjects Piper would undertake in his career. The white and yellow highlights of the still life radiate through the blue paint to echo the tones of the country house in the background. Piper would become particularly well known for painting country houses when the subject had fallen out of favour with other artists in the post war years. Painted during the crucial early stages of Piper's artistic career, the present work looks forward to many of the subjects and styles the artist would concern himself with in the coming decades.