The monument to his friendship with Betjeman is the Shell Guide series, the first of which was commissioned in 1937. The idiosyncratic and entertaining guides were early challenged by Nikolaus Pevsner's impersonally comprehensive The Buildings of England. But the Betjeman/Piper contention, that the brain should not be disconnected from the eye and heart in such matters, was flatteringly endorsed by Pevsner's close friend, Alec Clifton-Taylor, when he chose the Guides on Desert Island Discs.
War encouraged romantic feeling and provided endless ruins. Kenneth Clark considered Piper "the ideal recorder of bomb damage" and commissioned him to be a home-based war artist. Pictures of the gutted Coventry Cathedral pushed Piper to the forefront of public awareness alongside Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.
His career shows a logical progression from medium to medium, from watercolour to firework displays. That he designed all Benjamin Britten's major operas from 1946 onwards would alone assure his artistic place. Friendship with Britten led to Myfanwy writing three of his libretti, her chief claim to fame, although she was content to be a mother and hostess first and foremost. Marriage was "serious and final".
This did not exclude a "special relationship" with Clark, which Spalding treats with coy discretion.
As the fashion for his pictures waned in the 1950s, Piper increasingly relied on "delegated art" — stage-designing complemented by stained-glass commissions undertaken with the much younger and Roman Catholic Patrick Reyntiens. Among the duo's most sumptuous works are the major lights for Coventry Cathedral and Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral — claimed to be the largest stained-glass commission in the history of the Church.
Printmaking, ceramics, fireworks (the Queen's Silver Jubilee), tapestry, wallpaper, even Derbyshire well dressing, proved that "Pipers" could fit any medium. After some especially spectacular Piper fireworks, a guest told Myfanwy that she would never forget them. "You weren't supposed to forget them," came the reply. Gardening and flower pictures proved his envoi.
Spalding is an unapologetic Piper fan. She bridles at any criticism of her hero, even though the illustrations confirm for this reviewer what Douglas Cooper (and George VI: "You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper") saw as a formulaic weakness to place style before content. But John Piper did more than his bit for "pleasing decay" and "decrepit glory", which are at such a premium today; and Piper/Reyntiens stained-glass is assured its immemorial place.
