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Pen and black ink over touches of pencil, 38 by 56 cm (15 by 22 ins)

Benjamin Britten's last opera, Death in Venice was first perfomed at Aldeburgh in 1973 and Piper's designs for this production rank amongst his finest. Piper having been a co-founder with Britten of the English Opera Group had designed the sets and costumes for most of Britten's greatest stage work

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Signed l.r.: John Piper and inscribed with title (verso)

Gouache and watercolour heightened with oil over pen and ink

Provenance: Marlborough Fine Art, London (stock no.XLOL 11,595)

Price on request

Gouache and watercolour over pen and ink, 20 by 11 ins (51 by 28 cm)

This beautifully inventive design is the study for a Palm Sunday window in St Peter's Church, Wolvercote, situated on the Northern edge of Oxford.

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Dated l.r.: 24/viii/68

Gouache with wax resist over pen and ink and pencil, 17 by 24cm (6 3/4 by 9 1/2 in)

 

The date of the present work places it in a busy year for the artist that had included trips to France in the spring and to western Scotland in June. By August he had returned to Pembrokeshire to his holiday house at Garn Fawr. The almost fauvist colouring of this landscape is typical of the larger scale work he did there, all of it his own interpretation of particular features of the landscape. In a preface to an exhibition of his work from this date, Piper wrote of how such landscapes were not meant to be mere representations of a particular subject:

“…but the emotion generated by them at one moment in one special plane. They are about what Paul Nash liked to call the Genius loci. Romantic painting is about the particular not the general.” (Preface by the artist to John Piper, European Topography, 1967-69, Marlborough Fine Art, May-June 1969)

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Gouache with paper collage, 13.5 by 23.5cm (5 51/4 by 9 1/4in)

 

The subject of the present work is unknown, but it is likely to be an abstract based on a landscape. Similar work was produced on Piper’s many trips to Wales, but the papers used in this collage also bear some comparison with a screenprint of the Brittany coast from 1968 and a commission he completed for the textile manufacturers David Whitehead in the same year. In these works he returned to the same experimental techniques he had used in pictures of the Brittany coast from 1961.