Numbered ll. B138
Watercolour with brush and black ink, 132 by 80 cm

The Baptistery window for the newly rebuilt Cathedral in Coventry is John Piper’s pre-eminent work as a designer of stained glass and perhaps his most significant artistic project from the later part of his career. Alongside the glassmaker Patrick Reyntiens, Piper was commissioned by the Coventry Cathedral Reconstruction Committee to produce the Baptistery window in 1955. The window is 85 foot high and is constructed of 198 individual windows.. This abstract watercolour is a design for one such light and is painted to the same scale as the final window (to allow Reyntiens to copy it as precisely as possible) (see F. Spalding, John and Myfanwy Piper, Lives in Art, Oxford, 2009, p. 369). The effect of the entire window is spectacular – a huge abstract conception of a central burst of light intended to represent the Holy Spirit. The Rev Stephen Laird has also pointed at that the window can be read as a huge abstract landscape “the lower levels having the colours of earth and vegetation with bluer tones in the upper part indicating sky and surrounding a central sunburst.” Coventry Cathedral was consecrated in 1962 and the window is one of the central features in an extraordinary artistic collaboration which included contributions from Graham Sutherland, Jacob Epstein and Geoffrey Clarke, as well as Piper himself.