NEO-ROMANTIC LANDSCAPES, ENGLISH CHURCHES & ARCHITECTURE IN A WARTIME SKETCHBOOK

John Piper

Verlag: England Unpublished 1943, 1943

A remarkably rich wartime sketch-book in which John Piper recorded his 1943 summer tour of Devon and Cornwall in the company of Geoffrey Grigson, sketched Welsh landscapes as well as the Victorian villas and churches of the English Midlands while he stayed at Renishaw Hall, home of his friends Edith and Osbert Sitwell. Piper's sketches include churches in Exeter and West Ogwell in Devon, Lackington (later worked-up into an illustration to Betjeman's Guide to English Parish Churches) and Hemington in Leicestershire. From Cornwall Piper has sketched a ruin that would evolve into his 1943 'farmyard chapel' aquatint at Botallack and there are around a dozen sketches and watercolours of Piper's beloved Victorian villas, soon to be the subject of his collaboration with J M Richards in Castles on the Ground. Alongside the sketching, note-taking and train times, Piper also includes reading notes relating to Ruskin's Stones of Venice. Almost all of Piper's archive went to the Tate Gallery making this a rarity on the open market. PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION Green cloth-effect paper over boards (23.5x15.5cm), spattered with paint, with a now-loose elastic closure band and a pencil sleeve. The sketchbook has the label of the London stationer, C Robertson and Co 'Sketch Book Hand Made Water Colour Paper', priced in pencil '5/8' with a pencilled note in Piper's hand opposite relating to his friend the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. The sketch book's pages are of thick wove paper, designed to take water-colour, with a line of perforations 1cm from the gutter, similar to Piper's other notebooks that Piper used for sketching in the field (see Plates 76/77, Piper's Places, 1983). The manuscript comprises 21 leaves, one inserted drawing and one inserted postcard, with a similar number of stubs where pages have been removed - two of which have residue of black wash, similar to extant watercolour landscape sketches that survive in the sketchbook. Very much work in progress, the sketchbook records several facets of Piper's practice in 3 pages of pencil drawings; 7 pages of pen and watercolour wash, 12 pages of ink drawings and 5 pages of notes - 28 pages in total, with 14 blanks - mostly the versos of the more substantial watercolours. PROVENANCE: given by John Piper to Orde Levinson, friend and author of The Prints of John Piper: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1923-1991. NARRATIVE: WEST COUNTRY The first part of the sketch-book records Piper's July 1943 trip to the west country and into Cornwall that he took with Geoffrey Grigson. The sketchbook starts in Devon 'between Torbryan and Denbury' where Piper sketched, annotated and watercoloured a late Georgian house; continuing a mile up the road to the church at West Ogwell which is the subject of an ink sketch with extensive architectural annotation: 'dark box pews pitch pine (mostly removed) Jac.[obean] pulpit.' In Exeter Piper visited 6 of the city churches, particularly enjoying 'Holy Trinity. v fine wedding-cake W. front with portico & elaborate cupola (ogee) the whole painted pale grey.' and opposite these descriptions he made a carefully worked ink sketch of a blank arcade of niches, each with its urn and surmounted by a stone coat of arms. Below his church notes (recto), Piper has jotted down train (or perhaps bus) times from Exeter to Polperro and Looe in Cornwall. Once in Polperro Piper sketched a house on 'Meadow Terrace', adding additional annotation in orange crayon. The first of the sketchbook's watercolours follows this sketch, depicting a shower of rain over a coastal outcrop - perhaps from the south Cornish coastline near Polperro. Piper and Grigson's journey west reached its furthest point with two ink sketches of Hall Place, Botallack. The first of these is an exterior view which is a preparatory sketch for his aquatint completed in the same year (Hall Place, Botallack, Levinson 29), a sketchy rendering with three annotations and on the following leaf an internal view of the same buildi. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 8495

Bibliografische Details

Titel: NEO-ROMANTIC LANDSCAPES, ENGLISH CHURCHES & ...
Verlag: England Unpublished 1943
Erscheinungsdatum: 1943