Author: Richard Ingrams

Publisher:

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13:

For more than sixty years John Piper has painted, drawn, photographed and recorde his impressions of the landscapes and buildings of the British Isles. HIs interest in the natural order has ranged from the gentle, adapted landscape of Romney Marsh to the rocky wilderness of Snowdonia. His passion for buildings extends from the palladian country house to the cottage built in the vernacular, from an ornate Somerset church tower to the dusty clutter of a vestry. This association with topographical subjects has been sustained by many years work on the Shell Guides to the English and Welsh counties. The Guides, of which he was co-editor with John Betjeman and subsequently sole editor, financed, as Anthony West has put it, 'an exploration and penetration of the English and Welsh scene of an intensity and range which few artists have been able to undertake'. This book presents for the first time in one volume the range of John Piper's topographical work in the British Isles. Richard Ingrams, who has walked over and written about much of the country recorded by Piper himself, tells the story, with engaging and very appropriate informality, of the latter's life with the landscape, natural and created, of Britain; the influences on this aspect of his work; and the people who have joined him in it, including John Betjeman, J. M. Richards and Geoffrey Grigson. The text is enhanced by Piper's own reflections, some occasioned by the book itself others drawn from working notebooks, diaries and articles. The illustrations reproduce aquatints, drawings, collages, oil paintings and watercolours. Some of these paintings have been specially painted for the book, and many more are reproduced here for the first time. Piper's Places invites those who read it and look at its illustrations to observe afresh the British landscape through the eyes of the person who has done more to celebrate it than any artist since Turner.