Cottage across the Lake

This remarkable mixed media work from 1940 was made in the same year as England’s cities were blazing from incendiary bombs and much of Piper’s most important work was of the smoking ruins of churches. Cottage across the Lake contains not only echoes of his earlier printed work (the Brighton aquatints especially), but also of his 1939 renditions of Hafod, which marked his coming to terms with the English Romantic watercolour tradition in a contemporary topographical way. The subject is probably a cottage (though looking a little like a Modernist dwelling) above a Welsh lake or reservoir, and the strong element of linearity to the design may derive from the use of monoprint, as it does in at least one Hafod work and the contemporaneous landscape Trawsallt, Cardiganshire (1939). Certainly this was a period of experimentation and change for Piper, as this palely poised but dramatic picture demonstrates.

A.L.