Chambord

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

John Piper first visited France in 1955, and frequently returned to travel in the country, inspired by the buildings and landscapes of the French countryside, Chambord is one of many such examples of Piper’s work. This print depicts the castle at Chambord, Loir-et-Cher, one of the most recognisable châteaux in the world due to its distinctive Renaissance architecture. Built as a hunting lodge for King François I, it is the largest castle in the Loire Valley.
Piper is widely acknowledged for his numerous paintings, watercolours and prints of places and sites in Italy, France, England and North Wales. ‘I am a painter and draughtsman of landscape and architecture’ he declared when once asked to describe his subject matter. However, he was not merely a topographical artist, concerned with faithful representation of a place. Piper intended that his works ‘… express a personal love of country and architecture and the humanity that inhabits them.’
Talking about the prints he made of towns and villages in France in the 1970s, Piper said: 
he titles are the names of places, meaning that there was an involvement there, at a special time: an experience affected by the weather, the season and the country, but above all concerned with the exact location and its spirit for me. The spread of moss on a wall, a pattern of vineyards or a perspective of hop-poles may be the peg, but it is not hop-poles or vineyards or church towers that these pictures are meant to be about, but the emotion generated by them at one moment in one special place.  They are about what Paul Nash liked to call the genius loci. Romantic painting is about the particular, not the general.  I have enjoyed the fields and stone walls and smart hills of south-west Wales, and the darker, more insular-feeling West of Scotland landscape, and the poplars and water-meadows and the figs and mistletoe and walnuts of northern and central France.

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, Loire Valley

Subjects

topography, chateau

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

John Piper (1903 - 1992)

Title

Chambord

Edition

20/70

Date

1971

Medium

Screenprint

Acquisition

Purchased from Marlborough Graphics, March 1973

Inscription

below image: [left] 20/70 [right] John Piper

GAC number

9950