Artist painted in coloured light to honour Betjeman

A NEW display opening at the River & Rowing Museum next week will shed fresh light on the work of Fawley Bottom artist John Piper.

The artist, who died in 1992, enjoyed a long and varied career as a painter, printmaker and designer of opera and theatre sets.

From 1950 he began working in stained glass and was later commissioned to design the baptistry window for the new Coventry Cathedral.

It is this aspect of his work that the Mill Meadows museum is highlighting with its new display titled “Painting in Coloured Light: The modern stained glass designs of John Piper”.

The centrepiece of the display is the newly conserved “cartoon” or design for a stained glass window dedicated to the memory of Piper’s close friend and collaborator, Sir John Betjeman.

The completed window was installed at All Saints’ Church in Farnborough, Berkshire, close to where Betjeman had lived in the adjoining rectory.

Piper and Betjeman shared a love of the British landscape and churches, embarking on many a “church crawl” together.

Titled “Symbols of the Resurrection”, the Betjeman memorial was to prove Piper’s final stained glass window.

Its design echoes another window featuring fish, a tree and butterflies that Piper had worked on much earlier for Nettlebed.

A central tree of life rises upward in a serpentine movement as a sign of profusion, laden with coloured leaves and fruit.

The design for the window was created in Piper’s large barn studio at Fawley Bottom.

The cartoon then hung in Piper’s home for many years before being loaned by his family to the River & Rowing Museum in late 2018.

More recently the cartoon has been expertly conserved by paper conservator Amelia Rampton, whose work has brought the piece and its rich colours back to life.

Piper’s lifelong interest in stained glass began as a boy when he traced the stained glass windows near his childhood home in Surrey and on family holidays.

Over the years, the artist designed more than 60 stained glass windows, both for local churches and major cathedrals.

For Piper, it was the perfect medium in which to learn about how to use colour. He once said: “Stained glass is a great leader astray of anyone who works at it — designer and craftsman alike. In terms of colour and form it is eccentric. Colour is abnormally bright, since the light comes through the material instead of being reflected from the surface.

“Tone is usually dictated by bounding leads or area joints of some kind. The whole thing is imprisoned within glazing bars that form an inexorable grid and are structurally necessary. This is its proper splendid discipline.”

Museum curator Natalie Patel said: “We are extremely excited to feature this new spotlight display in our John Piper Gallery to
re-open the museum.

“Not only does it give incredible insight into John Piper’s creative process and how stained glass impacted his use of colour, but it shows conservation in action. It’s a must-see.”

The museum is re-opening on Thursday. Opening hours are 10am to 4pm and entry to “Painting in Coloured Light” is via general admission.

For more information and to book tickets, visit www.rrm.co.uk