John Piper

Curt Valentin, Buchholz Gallery, New York, where acquired by the present owner

San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Six British Artists, May 1950. 

S. John Woods, John Piper, Paintings, Drawings & Theatre Designs, 1932 - 1954, Curt Valentin, New York, 1955, cat. no.105, illustrated.

The work is on wove paper which is not laid down. The sheet is attached to the mount by pieces of tape along the upper edge on the verso. The surface of the sheet appears to be in good overall condition. Held under glass and presented within a mount in a composition frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Executed 1946-47.

Piper visited Wales in 1943, with a WAAC commission to paint the underground quarry in Manod where the collection of the National Gallery was being stored 'for the duration'. He was to return for prolonged periods, usually over the winter, for the next few years, renting a succession of spartan and primitive cottages. In the winter of 1946-47, the Piper family took a cottage, Bodesi, below the Tryfan mountain and this was to provide the artist with a rich source of dramatic inspiration. Piper had been studying Ruskin, a writer then wildly unfashionable, and had clearly absorbed some of his ideas of geology as a demonstration of 'the tragedy implicit in the human condition as a creature aware of being a thing of the moment in an eternal universe' (A.West, John Piper, Secker & Warburg, London, 1979, p.128).

However, Piper's dramatic rendition of the amazing winter light effects found in the area goes beyond this one particular reading. There are hints of his esteem for the eighteenth-century painters of the 'sublime', such as Richard Wilson whose own paintings of Cader Idris Piper had admired (we know that Piper went on trips to try and find the viewpoints of Wilson's paintings), but also an entirely personal rendition of the drama of an extreme and inhospitable landscape.