John Piper

1 portrait

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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John Piper

by Ida Kar
quarter-plate film negative, 1954
Purchased, 1999
Photographs Collection
NPG x133211

Sitterback to top

Artistback to top

  • Ida Kar (1908-1974), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 1567 portraits, Sitter in 137 portraits.

This portraitback to top

Kar photographed Piper at Fawley Bottom Farmhouse, Oxfordshire where he lived from 1935. He is shown with a stage design and his painting Stone Gate, Portland (1950), a coastal view that Piper depicted more frequently than any other landscape.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • Freestone, Clare (appreciation) Wright, Karen (appreciation), Ida Kar Bohemian Photographer, 2011 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 10 March to 19 June 2011), p. 68 Read entry

    Piper studied at the Royal College of Art before becoming a member of the avant-garde Seven and Five Society and, from 1934, developing abstract reliefs and beginning a collaboration with writer and librettist Myfanwy Evans (whom he married in 1937) on the magazine Axis. Piper gained prominence for a representational style as well as for his stage designs, notably for Benjamin Britten, with whom Piper first collaborated on the opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946). Piper, who had a versatile creative talent, worked with John Betjeman on the Shell Guides and was a skilled printmaker. In the year before Kar photographed him, Piper began his association with the stained-glass maker Patrick Reyntiens, producing windows for Oundle College chapel (1953-6) and the baptistery window (1957-62) in Basil Spence's new Coventry Cathedral. Kar photographed Piper at Fawley Bottom Farmhouse, Oxford where he lived from 1935. He is shown with a stage design and his painting Stone Gate, Portland (1950), a coastal view that Piper depicted more often than any other landscape. Myfanwy Piper's letter to Kar making the arrangements for this sitting in July ('we are away until Thursday and then have 3 hard days' work here ...') demonstrates the active schedules for which the Pipers were known.

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Events of 1954back to top

Current affairs

Roger Bannister runs the four-minute mile. Bannister was the first man to achieve the 'miracle mile', a feat that was thought by some to be impossible, beating his rival, the Australian John Landy, to the record. Bannister went on to a career as a distinguished neurologist.
Food rationing ends in Britain.

Art and science

J.R.R. Tolkien publishes the first two parts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Tolkien was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon language and literature and drew on his scholarly interests in history, language and mythology to create the fictional land of Middle Earth where the books are set.
Williams Golding publishes, Lord of the Flies.

International

The South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) is established in Bangkok. This international defence organisation was established as part of the 'containment' policy of limiting the influence of communism. SEATO was, however, found to be ineffective as the member organisations failed to agree on combined action; it was disbanded in 1977.

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