Jeff Phelps, Author & Poet | John Piper in Wiltshire

I went to see a John Piper exhibition in the Wiltshire County Museum in Devizes last week. It was the last few days of the exhibition and, while I expected it to be busy, it was surprisingly full of noisy white-haired men and women in anoraks exchanging knowing commentary, as if they were part of a cultural coach party.

There was a dismissive review of an exhibition of John Piper’s work in The Guardian. According to it, Piper never fully embraced modernism. His work was compared to a weak cup of tea. It was only when he started painting the bombed-out buildings after the second world war that he finally came into his own.
I thought that was harsh. He was a great champion of British architecture. This exhibition in Devizes concentrated on his work in and around Wiltshire and was only a small part of his output but it hinted at how wide his interests were.
Here’s a link to a video about his work with the poet John Betjeman on The Shell Guides.

His paintings and drawings made me nostalgic for Piper’s book illustrations that at one time seemed to be everywhere, like in the Shell Guides he prepared with Betjeman. His enthusiasm for old buildings was partly what inspired our architectural drawing training.

His drawing of the shops and houses in Devizes High Street, for instance, was lovingly done and the sort of high quality measured drawing that we were expected to produce as students – and I never could.
But his dark, brooding building interiors, his studies of Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge, Avebury and Lacock do say something about those lean years after the war. HIs notebooks, as one would expect, reveal a man obsessed with recording every detail, including signs above shops and pubs.
I chuckled to read how the late HM Queen, after visiting an exhibition of his most forboding work, is reported to have commented: Oh, dear, Mr Piper, you have been unlucky with the weather, haven’t you?