John Piper was born in Epsom, Surrey. He was articled in his father's legal practice before studying at Richmond School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. His real interests were in, as he put it, 'man-made monuments from pre-historic times to the present day'. After leaving the Royal College he worked in several fields: stage design, book illustration and as a writer of reviews and criticism. In 1940 he was appointed an Official War Artist, and this enabled him to continue travelling throughout the country, recording buildings, many of them badly damaged, but he was never interested solely in architecture, but in the spirit of a place, in the surroundings that gave a place its particular emphasis and context. This lead to a series of landscape works featuring natural beauty and drama.

 

Glossary

  • Design

    The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

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