Fiery genius

In July 1967, a young artist named John Nankivell, living in Wantage, plucked up the courage to knock on John Betjeman’s front door, in the same town, to show the poet (whom he had never met) some of his architectural drawings.

In July 1967, a young artist named John Nankivell, living in Wantage, plucked up the courage to knock on John Betjeman’s front door, in the same town, to show the poet (whom he had never met) some of his architectural drawings. Betjeman was impressed by the work. Though the buildings were depicted with careful detail, there was something about the perspective — a hardly perceptible distortion — that saved the drawings from being drily academic; it was as if the buildings were reflected in a lake with a slight shiver across its surface. The two men became friends. Betjeman bought Nankivell’s drawings and arranged for an exhibition of them to be held.

Five months after that first meeting, Betjeman wrote to Nankivell:

Penelope [the poet’s wife] said to me when we were motoring in Leamington last Sunday, about a sunlit house we passed, ‘It looks just like a John Nankivell’ & so it did. That is what being an artist is.

Presumably what Betjeman meant was that a good artist’s work is instantly recognisable as his or hers — sui generis. A pedant might object that just the same could be said of a really bad artist — as it were, ‘sui generis, thank goodness’. But we know what he was getting at. Good artists, great artists have their own distinctive, unmistakable dye. And John Piper (1903-1992) — perhaps half-way between good and great — was of their number. In the course of this magnificent book by Frances Spalding, we encounter many descriptions of his style when he was in his prime, some of them by leading authors and critics.