Visual Arts: Dark praises to the pleasures of decay

An exhibition of John Piper's landscape paintings from the 1940s reveals a moody and melancholy grandeur.

"OLD HOUSES, splintered in ancient glory and coruscating in their own decay." So Osbert Sitwell described John Piper's work of the 1940s. He himself became a significant patron of Piper, turning him loose on Renishaw Hall, the Sitwell family home in Derbyshire. Osbert's initial intention was to obtain illustrations for his five-volume autobiography, but the association between Piper and the Sitwells proved so fertile that he acquired far more.

Two years ago, the Stables Gallery in the grounds of Renishaw Hall offered a glimpse into this collection when it mounted "John Piper at Renishaw". Now we are offered a sequel, enriched with loans from the Tate Gallery and the Queen Mother and showing Piper elsewhere, confronting ruins in Bath after an air raid, Brighton's sprawling streets or the compact elegance of Nether Lyppiatt Manor near Stroud. At his direction, we travel across the quadrangle at Windsor, confront Hardwick Hall's airy but magnificent facade ("more glass than wall") and look down into the Physic Garden in Chelsea from a house in Swan Walk. At times these moody and romantic pictures have a Piranesian grandeur. At others, they convey a melancholy nostalgia.

Piper always aimed at more than topographical accuracy. Buildings were, for him, living entities, vulnerable to the ravages of time, neglect, weather or war. In his treatment of them, he is brisk, almost offhand, unlike Rex Whistler or Algernon Newton in whose more kindly hands country houses become period curiosities, timeless and unreal. He wrote in praise of "pleasing decay" and evolved a variety of techniques through which to realise it in his art. Working swiftly from lightning sketches, that served as notes for the final work, his rapid handling and rough surfaces can suggest the texture of weather-beaten stone, the movement of wind or spasmodic effects of light.

It is easy to forget, looking at these scenes, that in the mid-1930s Piper had been an abstract artist, closely associated with the avant-garde art magazine Axis whose editor, Myfanwy Evans, he married. His return to landscape painting in the late-1930s seemed retrogressive to many, despite a growing interest in past styles which had already produced Kenneth Clark's The Gothic Revival and Christopher Hussey's The Picturesque. Piper himself had long been fascinated by England's architectural heritage and had begun collaborating with John Betjeman on the Shell Guides, and with JM Richards on The Architectural Review. But it was the threat and eventual onset of war that made urgent his need to portray our architectural heritage. Not surprisingly, the success of these moody paintings lay partly in their appeal to patriotic sentiment.

Piper's skill at recapturing past monuments for present-day imagination owes much to his use of black. It suffuses this exhibition, adding drama to the glaciated rocks he drew in Snowdonia and darkening the sky around the bomb-damaged ruin of All Saints' Chapel, Bath. In the Windsor paintings, it famously gave rise to George Vl's remark: "You've been pretty unlucky with the weather, Mr Piper." Likewise, on a visit to Hardwick when, as Osbert Sitwell recalled, the house "shone like a cliff of gold in the hot, clear, mellow sunshine of an early September afternoon", Piper subjected it to every kind of gloomy and tenebrous effect. What light does emerge in this picture seems to battle its way out from within the building and owes more to the artist's response than to accidents of light and weather.

This encroaching darkness is mysterious and suggestive. In an oil painting of Bolsover Castle, Piper scratches into the gold of the walls and blue of the sky so that the black background breaks through with sombre effect. At times this persistent use of black is evocative of rage and melancholy, or it acts like a metaphor for the past, pressing in on the present. In some instances it may also relate to Piper's awareness of the proximity of industry. At Renishaw, coal dust used to blacken its statues and lake. Writing of Vanbrugh's Seaton Delaval, Piper found house and garden "scared by the east wind and riven with fretting industrialism" but still able to "withstand the noise and neglect, the fires and hauntings of twentieth- century life".

A few arbitrary gleanings in this show remind the viewer of Piper's involvement in other fields - with stage and fabric design, lithography, acquatints and photography, pottery and stained glass. No item was too small for his attention, as is shown by a wine label that he designed for Christie's Contemporary Art. The exuberance that Piper brought to every task is matched by the garden at Renishaw where Osbert's father, Sir George Sitwell, brilliantly translated an Italianate design into English terms. Arranged on various levels and divided by yew hedges, it offers long vistas punctuated by ornamental statuary, pools, fountain, temple and wonderful planting, the garden, at this time of year, surely looking at its best.

`John Piper at Other Places' runs until 26 September at the Stables Gallery, Renishaw Hall, Renishaw, near Sheffield, S21 3WB. Open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, or by appointment, 01777 860755