John Piper C.H.

(British, 1903-1992)

Harbour through a window 38.1 x 50.3 cm. (15 x 19 3/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, from whom probably acquired by
Mrs Amber Blanco White, thence by family descent
Private Collection, U.K.

The present work was executed the year following Piper's election to the Seven and Five Society. By this date, the exhibiting society had developed from its somewhat conservative routes to become the hub of modernism in Britain. Whilst Piper's compositions of this period share a kinship to fellow Seven and Five artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, and their adoption of British naïve art, his inclusion of collage is drawn primarily from the Cubist works of Braque and Picasso.

Piper's selected subjects were often the seaside towns along the south coast, including Rye and Newhaven, the topography of which he would occasionally remould to suit his compositional design. For these collages he included various materials including photographs, engravings, text and, as in the present example, foil and tobacco packaging. However, his dominant material for such works are cake doilies, a rather peculiarly English object. In many works these doilies form equally twee lace curtains, which not only accentuates the quaintness of the seaside, but rather amusingly provide an anglicised framing to the continental treatment that had well and truly permeated the shores of the scene beyond.