The Quay, Exeter

John Piper was a leading figure in 20th-century British Art and the creator of some of the most iconic depictions of the English landscape. During World War II he was an official war artist. On his travels to Devon during this period he was inspired by the colours and textures of the building materials used in Exeter and surrounding towns and villages, rather than any scenes of bomb destruction. Piper mixes several media in this picture to emphasise the different building stones used in this scene.

Piper had an unusually varied output, the Tate’s website lists him as ‘Painter of architecture, landscape and abstract compositions, designer for the theatre and of stained-glass windows, and writer on the arts’.

The Quay, Exeter uses watercolour and collage to depict some of the buildings in this part of Exeter. Prominent in the picture is the Custom House, the oldest extant such building in the country, and a place that was at the centre of Exeter’s woollen cloth export trade in the 17th and 18th centuries.  The image was published as the central image in an article entitled ‘Warmth in the West’ for Architectural Review, vol 96, 1944, but it is likely that the work was made on an earlier trip to Devon.

The picture is part of Piper’s practice that merged painting and collage. This side of his work was particularly strong in the late 1930s, a time when Piper was moving from an interest in abstract art to an expanded vision that included more representational elements. Many of the works of this period were published in the Architectural Review and include some of his most famous collage works, those that feature Welsh Nonconformist chapels. More locally there are a series of images, produced in 1936 for ‘Colour in the Picturesque Village’ in Architectural Review, vol 79. These depict scenes from East Devon villages in much the same style as The Quay, Exeter. It seems quite likely that The Quay, Exeter dates from this period.

Piper wrote about some of these topographic studies and their importance to him - ‘The titles are the names of places, meaning that there was an involvement there, at a special time: an experience affected by the weather, the season and the country, but above all concerned with the exact location and spirit to me.’  The Quay, Exeter certainly exudes that quality and atmosphere that Paul Nash describes as genius loci. 

Visual description: a collage of Exeter Quay. The Exeter Custom House, a dark red building with a white roof, dominates the scene. Its façade is marked by white rectangles and arches, illustrating the windows, doorways and brick detailing. To the right is a similar red building – the Harbour Master’s Office. Behind these two buildings, the rooftops and houses of Exeter are sketched in black ink. Above the buildings, there is a dark black sky.