Sheffield Suburb

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

John Piper is considered a significant British artist of the twentieth-century and renowned for his powerful paintings of his native landscape. According to art historian Alan Powers, Piper was interested in the relationship between 'an instinctive life force' and the rational. In this painting of a Sheffield suburb, Piper looks to capture the felt sense of a place through the visual. Sheffield was, for over two hundred years the steel-making capital of Britain and a heavily industrial town till well into the twentieth century. Piper's use of colour alongside the faint backdrop of an industrial cityscape, captures much of the spirit of what a neighbourhood in Sheffield may have felt like at the end of a long day's work in the early or mid-twentieth century. There is a warmth and a sense of activity in the painting, despite there being no human figures in the scene that he paints. There is a softness in his rendering of built architecture but also, in the use of black, of a sense of steadiness. Piper is known for using the language of abstraction to help develop an internal relationship to the settings that he painted. While he himself moved on from abstract painting, many still see him as a key influence for British abstraction.

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

England, Sheffield, Yorkshire, South Yorkshire

Subjects

topography, townscape/cityscape, street, house, church, spire, tower

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

John Piper (1903 - 1992)

Title

Sheffield Suburb

Date

c.1960

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 106.50 cm, width: 152.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, December 1967

Inscription

BR: John Piper

GAC number

7956