John Piper (artist) - Stowe - YouTube

The Romney Marsh book was a pocket-sized affair and the Brighton aquatints a portfolio, unlike the Stowe book produced 33 years later. Towards the end of Piper's life he produced a much larger portfolio of pictures of Stowe. For much of his life he'd been interested in Stowe. In fact he used to rent rooms in one of the garden ornaments at Stowe and used to stay there for quite a long time doing drawings and sketches and so on. The interesting thing here is that this is a book of colour reproductions of some of Piper's liveliest drawings of this magnificent place and this particular picture, the Pebble Alcove, is reproduced as a full-page illustration in Stowe but whereas that is a reproduction this is an original screen print. It's a flat surface and it's printed through silk screens. It's an interesting example of how Piper had gone from quite a small portfolio at the start, a landscape book of a townscape subject, and he came to this massive folio to record the grandeur of the 18th century that he so much admired. Landscape delight unique in England. There was much more untidiness, more dilapidation of buildings and more pleasing decay than I've ever seen there since. Piper thought that buildings were like people. They had personalities and characters and that like people they should be allowed to both live and die and hence he coined the term pleasing decay which was against the notion of too much tidying up and too fixed of an approach to conservation which fixes a building in a particular moment of time. He thought buildings should go on Pleasing decay has formed a part of the vocabulary of English Romantic painting for 150 years. Those people who have no eye for it say that it indicates the decay of the mind to dwell on it. Those who have an eye for it say that a weathered building can symbolise the whole of man's relation to nature.