John Piper and the Church

The commissioning of contemporary art for churches from significant British artists that began through the work of Walter Hussey and George Bell led to numerous stained glass and tapestry commissions for churches and cathedrals by John Piper, among others. Among Piper's most notable church commissions are pieces for the new Coventry Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral and Hereford Cathedral.
Piper had a life-long fascination with, and care for, church buildings; a relationship which began as a young boy when he produced his own sketches and guidebook to the churches in his home county of Surrey. In addition to his links with churchmen such as Hussey, Bell and Moelwyn Mer­chant, Piper enjoyed a 50 year friendship with Revd. Dr. Victor Kenna writing that “Kenna . . . had a lasting and import­ant influence on my life, combining as he did (and alas so few clergymen do) an understanding of the author­ity of the Church and the authority of form in paintings and sculpture.”

While, in his early artistic career, Piper was involved with the modernist 7 and 5 Society and Axis, the modernist journal edited by his wife Myfanwy, he moved from the creation of purist abstracts to celebrate and record, in forms that are both romantic and modern, an English provincial world of old churches and stately homes. His subsequent paintings mainly focus on the British landscape and churches. 

Stephen Spender noted that Piper and Eliot, among others in this period, were linked in their commitment to the "idea of the sacred." Christopher Frayling has written that, the Neo-Romantic movement (of which Piper was part along with Graham Sutherland who also gained significant church commissions in the period), "sometimes chimed with the aspirations of the post-war Church of England" as they "searched for a lost Eden amid the ruins of the contemporary landscape: who wanted to depict its desolation while striving to reach beyond it; who felt it might soon be closing time in the gardens of the West, and who thought of the pastoral as one of the few remaining symbolic ideas in the culture from which to draw hope." 

An exhibition at Dorchester Abbey currently celebrates the contribution John Piper made to the development of modern art in British churches throughout the twentieth century. More than 70 works spanning Piper’s diverse and illustrious career are in the exhibition along with key works from public collections including the Britten-Pears Foundation; Manchester City Art Gallery; Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; The Collection, Lincolnshire and the V&A. The exhibition also includes special works from private collections, most of which have been rarely seen.

For the first time ever, one of each of the ecclesiastical vestments designed by John Piper for Coventry Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral, St Paul's Cathedral and the very first cope commissioned by Walter Hussey in c. 1954 are on show together. Piper's first piece of stained glass, together with his stained glass designs and cartoons, tapestries, photographs, drawings, collages, paintings and prints are also be on display in this major exhibition of his overwhelming artistic passion.

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Herbert Howells - One Thing Have I Desired.