John Piper in the South Country

This major exhibition highlights how John Piper (1903-92) responded to the landscape and architecture of the south country of Wiltshire and Dorset. Curated by Andrew Lambirth, ‘John Piper in the South Country’ launched at Wiltshire Museum in March 2026 and is on tour to Museum & Art Swindon as part of the Arts Council England funded Wessex Museums Partnership programme.

 Piper is a widely popular artist, but there has been no previous exhibition of the work he did in the south and south-west of England. Yet he made some of his most significant paintings of subjects from this area, including Stourhead, Fonthill and Lacock, and one of his finest early collages is of the neolithic site at Avebury. The exhibition includes examples of all these, plus a number of the churches in the locality, from Inglesham to Knowlton and Britwell Salome. Piper also painted different aspects of Salisbury Plain: a view of a neolithic barrow, the land under plough in the Second World War, and the great monument of Stonehenge. Other subjects include a street corner in Lydiard Park, Cerne Abbas and several studies of the Isle of Portland.

While these images map Piper's love of Wiltshire and Dorset, they also track his changing style of working. John Piper was one of many English artists who adopted abstraction as the language of International Modernism in the early 1930s, and consequently made some powerful paintings and reliefs in a completely non-representational style. But he soon discovered that for him a purely formal art of geometric lines and colours, however subtly orchestrated, was not enough. He missed having recognisable subject matter – things he had seen and enjoyed in the world around him. So he gradually returned to nature, through drawings, paintings and collages of landscapes and buildings. He became a great Romantic artist, dealing with the significant particulars of a subject.

John Piper in the South Country brings together artworks from private and public collections across the country.  They join Swindon’s own Bolingbroke at Lydiard Tregoze (1940) from the collection at Lydiard House Museum.

Our Guest Curator is Andrew Lambirth, author and art critic. He has more than 25 monographs on Modern British artists to his credit, including John Nash, David Inshaw, Maggi Hambling and John Hoyland. He has also curated more than 20 exhibitions since 1990, including Peter Blake at Morley Gallery (1999), Eileen Agar at Pallant House (2008), Cedric Morris at the Garden Museum (2018) and Michael Ayrton at The Lightbox (2021).

A catalogue to accompany the exhibition is available here.

Image: Bolingbroke at Lydiard Tregoze (1940) by John Piper, Swindon Museums, ©2026 The Piper Estate / DACS