Basic HTML Version
15
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
was so inspiring that he could
put you off suicide.
After the war, Piper became increasingly well
known for modern stained glass windows and
undoubtedly his most famous creation is the
Baptistry window at Coventry Cathedral. You can
make quite a hobby of tracking down Piper’s work.
There’s the window at the ancient church at the
riverside village of Iffley on the outskirts of Oxford
and down stream towards London he designed
windows for Eton College Chapel. He found
particular inspiration in the landscape of Sussex and
Kent designing a window for Lamberhurst church
and a beautiful series of watercolours of the Romney
Marsh churches: St Clements at Old Romney is
pictured on page 13. I wonder if Piper ever visited
ancient St Clements after it’s Georgian box pews
and choir gallery were painted in pink and teal by
the Walt Disney Corporation for the filming of their
production of Russell Thorndike’s Dr Syn - the
smuggling vicar of Dymchurch . The ‘scarecrows’
own church at Dymchurch had been rejected by
Disney for being too dark! Too Un-Disney?
Living in the Chilterns for so long it is not surprising
to find that a number of Chilterns churches have
stained glass windows designed by John Piper,
notably St Paul’s in Bledow Ridge, Christ Church in
Flackwell Heath, St. Mary the Virgin in Turville,
St Mary's in Fawley, St Bartholomew's in Nettlebed
and St. Paul's in Pishill. He also made memorial
windows for his friends, Betjeman at Farnborough
in Hampshire and Benjamin Britten in Suffolk’s
Aldeburgh. When Piper had worked with John
Betjeman on the Shell county guides the future
Poet Laureate had told him:
“You have saved much of England by your pictures of
architecture and landscape. What is more you have
increased our vision. Things look like pictures by
Mr Piper and look better for having been seen by
him.”
And this surely sums up Pier’s great contribution to
20
th
century British art.
Perhaps no artist since Turner
has done so much to celebrate British landscape and
architecture. A neo-Romantic Piper’s images are more
vivid than the real thing. During the 40s and 50s he
was one of Britain’s biggest artists, along with Henry
Moore and Graham Sutherland and today some of his
lithographs and screenprints are in the Tate Collection.
What a life lived! And how blessed that he had found
Myfanwy. Golden Myfanwy said Betjeman who wrote
poems about her. Art historian Roy Strong wrote in his
diary of the artist Graham Sutherland ‘What a shame
he never found a Myfanwy’.
John Piper’s health failed him in his final years. He
died at Fawley Bottom in 1992. Myfanwy kept her
zest for life to the very end, running up and down stairs
throughout her eighties. She died five years after John
at the farm house they had loved following a good
lunch and two glasses of port.
If you enjoy biography I heartily recommend Frances
Spalding’s John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art.
See Piper’s tapestry at Chichester Cathedral during a
day out to
Chichester Christmas Market.
On the next few pages are description of a visit to
Coventry Cathedral
from the City & Village Tours
back catalogue and a brand new tour to Oxford which
includes a cruise along the River Isis (as the Thames is
known there) to see Piper’s window in Iffley Church.
Fawley Bottom Farm