Welsh Landscape, Tretio

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2 Marsham Street

Amid inky darkness, a group of white and yellow buildings stand out on a distant hill in Welsh Landscape, Tretio, a print by John Piper. This is one of several works he made in the early 1960s, during which he and his wife Myfanwy Piper, an art critic and librettist, bought a cottage in Pembrokeshire, south Wales. 

This print depicts the village of Tretio on the St David’s peninsula. With a joyful expression of colour and assured calligraphic marks, this work is characteristic of Piper’s romantic interpretation of the landscape, in the tradition of 19th-century Romantic painters such as Samuel Palmer and William Blake. Myfanwy Piper once described his work as ‘that mysterious magic presence that collects the dreams of the past, which like wasp stings accumulating in the blood, accumulate in the mind and imagination’.

Piper had a long relationship with the Welsh landscape: he made his first painting trip to Wales in 1937 and this was followed by trips in the 1940s to make architectural watercolours of Welsh chapels and castles. Between 1944 and 1949, the Pipers rented cottages in Snowdonia, north Wales, taking inspiration from its distinctive terrain. 

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

Wales, Pembrokeshire

Subjects

topography, landscape C20th

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

John Piper (1903 - 1992)

Title

Welsh Landscape, Tretio

Edition

53/100

Date

1969

Medium

Screenprint

Acquisition

Purchased from Marlborough Graphics, September 1972

Inscription

below image: 53/100 / John Piper 69

GAC number

9815