Raymond Piper

Raymond Piper HRUA HRHA MUniv (4 April 1923 – 13 July 2007) was British a botanist and an artist.

Raymond Piper was born in London on 4 April 1923 the son of Frank Piper.

At the age of six his family moved to Belfast.

Piper attended Skegoniel Primary before receiving a general education at Belfast Royal Academy.(according to the Dictionary of Ulster Biography he was educated at Mercantile College/later known after moving to Jordanstown as Belfast High School).in

Piper attended nightclasses at Belfast School of Art for one year, where he was taught by Cornish artist Newton Penprase.

For a time he was a teacher at the Royal School Dungannon.

Piper worked at Belfast shipbuilders Harland and Wolff between 1940 and 1946 where he carried sketch books in his pockets to fill in time between jobs.

He sketched his fellow workers and pictures of Cave Hill, but he had no interest in capturing ships on paper.

Piper began a long association with the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1942 when he showed three works 'Dad', Sunrise Knockah 1941, and April Day, and exhibited a work each in 1944 and 1946, before an offering of two child portraits and a glass case called The White Goddess in 1948.

Piper joined the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club in 1946 where he was twice president in 1971–1972 and 1983–1984.

In 1947 fellow Belfast Naturalist Richard Hayward asked him to submit his best works to Hayward's publishers.

They were impressed and shortly thereafter Piper gave up his engineering apprenticeship to become a professional artist.

His main income was as a portrait painter and he included among his subjects several Lord Mayors of London and Belfast.

Piper contributed work to the short-lived Ulster literary magazine Rann, founded by Roy McFadden and Barbara Edwards (née Hunter) in 1948.

Piper began his career in illustrating old Irish buildings and sites of archaeological interest.

In 1950 Piper won a CEMA travel award which took him to Paris for a year.

Piper showed a portrait of Belfast coroner Dr HP Lowe along with a watercolour landscape at the 1950 annual exhibition after the Ulster Academy of Arts had been granted their Royal Charter.

Many of these drawings were used to illustrate books by fellow member of the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club, Richard Hayward, such as Ulster and the City of Belfast (1950), Connacht and the City of Galway (1952) and Munster and the City of Cork (1964).

The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts awarded Piper a travel scholarship of £50 in 1950 when he had a choice of two destinations, Paris or Vienna.

Although Piper rarely exhibited he presented work at International Faculty of Arts in London in 1953.

In 1953 Piper presented his first solo exhibition at the CEMA Gallery in Belfast.

The show was primarily portraits of local luminaries such as the producer and actor Harold Goldblatt, the playwright Patrick Riddell, and Lord Mayor James Norritt.

The exhibition included none of Piper's recent topographical drawings but did include pastels of happy children and a few pencil drawings of old Belfast commissioned by CEMA for their local collections.

Early in 1956 Piper completed a fourteen foot high mural of Christ on the Sea of Galilee, The Flying Angel for the Belfast Seaman's Mission, where he was to return in 1977 to conduct repairs on the damaged painting.

In May 1956 Piper completed a mural commission for the mammal house at Belfast Zoo.

He exhibited at the CEMA gallery in 1957 alongside several of his Ulster contemporaries, all former recipients of CEMA travel bursaries.

Piper also contributed a coloured print for the cover of Hayward's Border Foray in 1957.

He also displayed three portraits including oils of ex-Belfast Lord Mayor Sir John Harcourt, and Ulster poet John Irvine, at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1958.

Piper was commissioned to paint the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Lord Brookeborough on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1958.

The latter publication contained 126 sketches by Piper, drawn on location in Munster in the spring of 1960 when Piper and his botanical friend explored the region together.

The Belfast Telegraph's book reviewer writes,"'Perhaps the highest praise one can pay these collaborators is that their work is comparable to and in some ways excels Stephen Gywm and Hugh Thomson...Mr Piper contributes some exquisite sketches of the flora of the region which contains a remarkable number of plants and rocks.'"Piper also held an exhibition with Richard Hayward at the Glenmachan Tower Hotel in Belfast earlier that year.

Speaking of his choice of illustrator for Ulster and the City of Belfast, author Richard Hayward said,"'My choice of this young Belfast artist has turned out to be fortunate even beyond my high expectations and I would like to place on record my warm regard for the cheerful manner in which this young man has ever sought to accomplish the tasks which I set him as well as the deep satisfaction which the brilliance and integrity of his work has brought me.'"The foreword to the book was written by Maurice Walsh, author of the Quiet Man.

Piper presented a one-man show at the Royal Watercolour Society Galleries, London in 1961.

The show comprised 64 works and was opened by one of the subjects, the Lord Mayor of London Bernard Whaley-Cohen.

In 1962 Piper hosted a solo exhibition in the Whitla Hall at Queen's University, Belfast.

The Coffee Shop at the corner of College Street and Queens Street, Belfast, was the venue for an exhibition of two series of Piper's work in the same year.

Piper made several contributions including a double portrait Audrey and Barbara and the nurseryman Sam McGredy to the Ulster Artists exhibition at the Magee Gallery also in 1962.

His contemporaries on this occasion were T P Flanagan, Dan O'Neill, Kenneth Webb, Rowland Hill, Maurice Wilks and Frank McKelvey.

He became an Honorary Member in 1990.

He took great interest in the flowers of Ireland especially orchids.