John Piper 1903-1992
Brighton Pavilion, c1938
oil and pencil, canvas collage on board
21 by 38 inches
signed, signed and titled verso

Provenance
Leicester Galleries, London, purchased in 1940 by
Private Collection, UK
Thence by Descent

Exhibited
London, The Leicester Galleries, Paintings and Watercolours by John Piper, Paintings by Henry Lamb, March 1940, cat no.23, price listed as 40 Guineas

Atlanta, High Museum, loan exhibition, 1951

Literature
Atlanta Art Association Bulletin, March 1951, illus

Brighton's architectural extremes appealed to the artist John Piper, and in late 1938 he visited with a view towards writing an article for Architectural Review. The trip also inspired a large number of works, including a suite of fourteen prints in the then hardly used medium of aquatint which seem originally to have been intended for a book in imitation of the travel literature of the Regency period.

No investigation of Brighton's architecture could miss out the Royal Pavilion, and the present work seems to be the prime version of a number of renderings of the building described by Piper as 'hilarious', 'human', 'acutely vulgar' and 'extremely sensitive'