John Piper | Items for sale, auction results and history

John Piper was born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1903. He attended the Richmond School of Art and later the Royal College of Art in London. Since early on in his artistic career, Piper was captivated by the romantic and rugged beauty of the British countryside, as well as its historic churches, castles and ruins.

Piper was a keen topographer, visiting thousands of churches, with particular interest in those of England and Wales, sketching and taking photographs. As a boy, he was the honorary local secretary of the Surrey Archaeological Society. Piper did not confine himself to one particular district or style of architecture. He enjoyed the bold carving of the Norman fonts and doors, the splendour of the great wool churches of flinty East Anglia and the towers and spires of the limestone belt stretching from Lincolnshire to Somerset.

The abstract works that John Piper produced in the 1930s mark one of the most productive and celebrated periods of his career. Moving away from descriptive narrative Piper turned his attention to creating a series of abstract paintings, developing a language of form, line and colour, which was born from his instinctive search for everyday symbols of geometry. During this period, Piper became associated with the Seven and Five Society, a group of modernist artists which included Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and David Jones, among others.

However, Piper soon returned to a more representational style, blending modernism with traditional subjects. During World War II, he was appointed as an official war artist. In this role, Piper was tasked with recording the impact of the war on Britain’s architecture and landscape. His paintings from this time, such as the haunting images of bomb-damaged Coventry Cathedral, are among his most powerful works.

Beyond painting, Piper was also a prolific designer, contributing to stage sets, stained glass windows and tapestries. His collaborations with poet John Betjeman on the Shell Guides, a series of travel books celebrating British architecture, further solidified his reputation as an artist deeply connected to the cultural fabric of Britain. John Piper died in 1992 at the age of 88.