WEST WALTON | JOHN PIPER’S LOVE OF ‘EXQUISITE DECAY’

John Piper (1903-1992) was a remarkable polymath, a writer and editor as well as a prolific artist, who worked across numerous genres and styles, from abstract painting to opera set design to stained-glass windows. But he will, perhaps, be best remembered as a draughtsman and painter of gloweringly picturesque landscapes, with a penchant for historic English buildings. And particularly buildings which had deteriorated into what he described as ‘an exquisite state of decay’.

The above work, painted in 1980, is a watercolour of St Mary’s, in West Walton, near Wisbech in Norfolk, an Early-Gothic church built around 1250. It’s an interesting building, as you can see from this image, the campanile a free-standing structure some 60+ feet from the main church. This is a fairly common feature of churches in the area, according to Richard Ingrams in the monograph Pipers’s Places: ‘the builders fearing land subsidence on the damp Fenland soil’.

The painting sees Piper employing a highly figurative, calligraphic style to describe the church buildings, and a more abstract, experimental technique to capture the nature that surrounds it, the branches of the tree in the foreground hinted at with thick squiggles, the sky brought to life by broad downward strokes in two hues of blue. He has ‘cropped’ the image, as if it were a photograph; interestingly an actual photograph he took of the tower, in the Tate collection, is more conventionally formatted. 

In 1981, this original painting was made by Marlborough Gallery into a screenprint, in a limited edition of 70, which come up regularly in auctions. The original painting, however, never before has.

Patrick Bourne will be exhibiting works by Piper, along with pieces by Haidee Becker, Joan Eardley, Sir William Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson and Anne Redpath at Stand 7 on the Ground Floor of the Saatchi Gallery at British Art Fair.

Patrick Bourne & Co