John Piper
Painted bombed churches as an official war artist, and English buildings for sixty years after.
John Piper was born in Epsom in 1903, worked in his father's solicitors' office until he was twenty-five, and was briefly one of the few British abstract painters of the 1930s before returning decisively to landscape and architecture. As an official war artist he painted Coventry Cathedral the morning after the raid and the bombed churches of London and Bristol, and was sent to record Windsor Castle in case it was destroyed. Afterwards came stained glass at Coventry, textile and theatre design, the Shell Guides, and thousands of images of English churches, ruins and country houses. He died in 1992.
A broad and deep British market with a very large supply, since Piper worked constantly for six decades across oil, gouache, watercolour, collage and print. The wartime pictures and the 1930s abstracts are the scarcest and strongest. He was a prolific and technically excellent screenprinter and lithographer, and those editions are plentiful and modestly valued. Mixed-media works combining ink, gouache, wax resist and collage on paper are numerous and are what most owners hold; light damage and mount-burn are the usual condition issues.
If you own a work by John Piper
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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