Bélesta near Perpignan

Location

Country: France
City: Paris
Place: British Embassy

Combining the fluidity of watercolour painting with a visually structured composition of horizontal and vertical lines and blocks of colour, this work by John Piper provides a view of a small village in the French Pyrénées. Economic yet bold dabs of colour convey the brown roofs and white façades of buildings; while a variation of khaki to bright green lines, blobs and semi-crosshatched sections add to the visually rich texture of the work. 

Bélesta near Perpignan is one of several works that Piper made during a particularly productive period of work while touring France with his family in the summers of 1958 and 1959. He and his wife, Myfanwy, accompanied by three of their four children, undertook energetic driving tours of southwest France in the family’s Citroën. In the 2015 book, The Art of John Piper (co-authored with Hugh Fowler-Wright), art historian David Fraser Jenkins describes these visits as: 

… four weeks of driving in France [that] fed Piper’s eyes like food given to a hungry gourmet. Arriving somewhere he would begin a search for visual subjects…

Chiefly known for his depictions of landscapes and buildings in Italy, France, England and Wales, Piper focused his artistic vision on as he once observed ‘... express[ing] a personal love of country and architecture and the humanity that inhabits them’.

John Piper was born in Epsom, Surrey and worked in his father’s solicitors’ firm until 1926. He later studied art in Richmond and London. Meeting Braque in Paris inspired him to make abstract art and to exhibit with the Seven and Five Society (1934–35). In 1935 Piper collaborated with Myfanwy Evans (later, his wife) on the pioneering review, ‘Axis’. He abandoned abstract art for Neo-Romanticism and during the Second World War, as an Official War Artist, he recorded bomb-devastated buildings of England’s disappearing architectural heritage. A versatile artist, Piper made book illustrations, theatre designs, ceramics, stained-glass and textiles. He collaborated with Patrick Reyntiens on stained glass projects which included the baptistry window for what was then the new Coventry Cathedral, and the stained glass lantern for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Retrospectives of Piper's work were held at the Museum of Modern Art (Oxford, 1973) and the Tate (1983–84).

Places

France, Ariège, Bélesta

Subjects

topography, abstract, landscape C20th, townscape/cityscape, field, house

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), watercolour (as artists materials), watercolour (as object name)

Artist

John Piper (1903 - 1992)

Title

Bélesta near Perpignan

Date

c1958-1960

Medium

Watercolour on paper

Dimensions

height: 56.00 cm, width: 77.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Leicester Galleries, March 1962

Provenance

Consigned by the artist to Leicester Galleries, London; from whom purchased by the Ministry of Works in March 1962, as ‘Bellester, near Perpignan’

GAC number

5757