Dimensions: support: 711 x 883 mm frame: 942 x 1117 x 83 mm
Copyright: © Tate | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Oh, there's a palpable sense of decay and grandeur. Editor: Indeed, John Piper's "Seaton Delaval" captures that perfectly. He, born in 1903, found beauty in the melancholic shadows of architecture. Curator: It feels as though history is pressing down on you. The colours – those browns and blacks – they evoke a world where stories linger in every stone. Editor: Piper was fascinated by romanticism's ruinous aesthetic. Seaton Delaval Hall, after a fire, became this potent symbol for him, a testament to time's passage and the weight of memory. Curator: It's heavy but beautiful, isn't it? Like a gothic novel condensed into a single frame. Editor: Yes, it’s a meditation on how places accumulate our collective past and project a powerful symbolic force. Curator: That's put beautifully. Now I need to go and spend some time reflecting about all of this. Editor: It's a pleasure to consider art's lingering impact with you.
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The baroque castle of Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, was built by John Vanbrugh between 1718 and 1729 and destroyed by fire in 1822. Piper visited the castle in 1941. He had previously made records of major buildings in anticipation of their destruction through bombing or modernisation. He had also recorded bomb-damage, and found parallels between the ruined castle and these recent subjects. The image seems to be both a nostalgic lament for a lost time and a statement about the present. Piper described the castle’s colouring as ‘ochre and flame licked red, pock-marked and stained... incredibly up-to-date: very much of our times’. Gallery label, July 2007
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