St. Kew, Cornwall: church in a hilly landscape |
Signed and numbered in pencil.
In 1963/64 Piper produced a portfolio of twenty-four prints entitled A Retrospect of Churches and he wrote to his old friend John Betjeman asking him to contribute a foreword to accompany them saying,
...you and I have visited a large number of these churches separately or together over the years. This is a retrospect of some of these churches and a retrospect of the lithographic art as I have tried to understand it over the same long period …
As Betjeman’s foreword captured the essence of Piper’s art and passion for church architecture so well, the relevant part is quoted here:
John Piper … is a keen topographer and photographer and guide book writer and for those reasons has been into thousands of churches sketching and taking photographs. The more you look at churches the more you appreciate their varying atmospheres – whether the vicar is high or low or breezy or lazy or crazy. You notice too oddities of furnishing, hymn boards, oil lamps, electric lighting, pipes, wires and heating stoves. John Piper does not confine himself to one particular district or style of architecture. He enjoys the bold carving of the Normans on 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. He likes to show what time does to churches and the effect of lichens on country churches and smoke on town ones and decay on both. He responds to Renaissance monuments and to the mighty bulk of Hawksmoor’s East London churches which were built for post-Reformation merchants and sea-captains in days of growing commercial prosperity. He was the first artist to appreciate the originality and sense of scale of the great Victorian architects such as Street and Butterfield who had hitherto been dismissed as mere copiers of the Medieval. He was also the first to recognise the visual appeal of non-conformist chapels. He enjoys the shock tactics of a man like S. S.Teulon who went further than Butterfield in deliberately flouting Gothic conventions. The accompanying lithographs are the distillation of half a century’s looking at churches.
Piper was clearly pleased with Betjeman’s foreword because he wrote to him,
...the intro is very good indeed and I am delighted with it. |
