John Piper

Alex Reid & Lefevre, London
Redfern Gallery, London, where acquired by John Gielgud Esq. in 1946
Leicester Galleries, London
Dr Cunningham, by 1986
Sale, Christie's London, 12th June 1998, lot 39, where acquired by the present owner

Southampton, Southampton Art Gallery, Art on the Liners, May 1986, lent by Dr Cunningham;
Durham, Grey College, University of Durham, John Piper: A Retrospective, 29th April - 15th May 1999, cat. no.8, illustrated p.6;
London, Imperial War Museum, John Piper: The Forties, 19th October 2000 - 28th January 2001, cat. no.13, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue p.67.

S. John Woods (intro.), John Piper, Paintings, Drawings and Theatre Designs 1932-1954, Faber & Faber, London, 1955, illustrated pl.52.

The board is sound. The corners and a few places along the edges are slightly worn. There is a tiny abrasion to the lower half of the right edge, which corresponds to an old nail head. There are other nail heads visible along the edges. Otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals scattered small areas of fluorescence, some of which may be retouching, and others which appear to be in the artist's hand. Held in a dark stained and painted wooden composition frame under glass; unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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Piper's return from abstraction appears at first sight to be a swift move back to recognisable subject matter, the architecture of a variety of sources seemingly solidly presented. Yet in his paintings like Royal Adelaide: A Simonds House, Windsor, we begin to realise how much of this interpretation we are bringing to the picture ourselves. Based on the Royal Adelaide Hotel in Windsor, the basic form of the building is still to be seen today. However, Piper has almost entirely stripped away the details that a mere illustrator would have included, and considering his interests in the Victorian public house and its styles and decoration (for example, a large Bass advertising sign, salvaged by Piper from 'improvements' at The Catherine Wheel pub in Henley in 1936 hung at the top of the stairs at Fawley Bottom for many years), one might have expected to have been part of his rendition. The painting is, in many ways, essentially still abstract, an abstracted version of the subject from which the artist has drawn just a few simple elements and by a combination of suggestion and our readiness to insert our own knowledge of such buildings made it convincing. Yet, once we become aware of this, the colours and forms flip back and forth between realism and abstraction, leaving us uncertain of what exactly we are seeing. A small group of paintings produced around this time share this unsettling quality, buildings that appear windowless and featureless, almost as though they are shut up, neglected, empty streets running past their thresholds.

Painted just as the approaching storm of war was breaking, perhaps Piper is offering us some intimation of the neurotic and maybe even pessimistic anticipation that must have attended those times.