The 'firework' master

As at home on a theatre set as he was before a canvas, John Piper pioneered abstract art in many materials, from stained glass to textiles, and even choreographed the Queen’s Silver Jubilee firework display, says Peyton Skipwith

- Peyton Skipwith

JOHN EGERTON CHRISTMAS PIPER was one of the 20th century’s great polymaths. A watercolourist in the romantic tradition of Turner, Girtin and Cotman, he was also a pioneer of abstract art in Britain, designer of stained glass, textiles, tapestries, ceramics, stage sets and costumes; a printmaker, muralist, writer, photographer and ‘firework master’, as a current exhibition at the Portland Gallery, London SW1, highlights. He was also a medievalist, who, in an article for Architectural Review (October 1936) declared that the ‘purely non-figurative artists of some of the early Northumbrian and Cornish crosses were the forebears of the pure abstractionists of today’. If there is one pre-eminent strand that runs consistently through Piper’s work, it is his enduring love of Northern European sculpture, from the Dark Ages through to the 15th century.

Born in Epsom, Surrey, the youngest of three sons of Charles Piper, a London solicitor, he early developed an interest in ecclesiastical art and architecture and, at the age of 16, became secretary of the local branch of the Surrey Archaeological Society. His elder brother Charles, who was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps, was killed at Ypres in 1915, with the result that John, despite showing little aptitude for law, was obliged to join his father’s practice. Release came, however, with his father’s death in 1927, at which point he applied for admission to the Royal College of Art, although he was sent first to Richmond to improve his life-drawing skills. It was there that he met his future wife, Eileen Holding.