
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
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Sold for £43,750 inc. premium
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Head of UK and Ireland

Head of Department

Director
Provenance
Mr. C.S. Collinson, Dublin, 1957, from whom acquired by
Private Collection, and by descent
Their sale; Christie's, London, 26 May 2011, where acquired by the present owner
Park Place is a lavish 18th century private residence in the parish of Remenham, Berkshire, near Henley-on-Thames. Piper lived nearby and painted rural Oxfordshire often, most notably for the Shell Guide to Oxfordshire in 1938. The present oil depicts the boathouse and 'Conway' bridge on the estate, with a fittingly moody wartime atmosphere. Piper's visionary approach to landscape extends the 18th century Romantic tradition, championed by artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner, John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. Indeed Piper was most probably aware that Gainsborough's brother Humphrey designed the bridge depicted, a fact that very well may have drawn the artist to this particular subject. His reference to a distinctly English landscape and artistic tradition was a fitting response to the instability that Britain was suffering under the attack of Nazi Germany.
There is a lithograph of the same title illustrated in English, Scottish and Welsh Landscape, and a second oil, Park Place, Henley-on-Thames (1941, Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums).