The recent death of Raymond Piper in Belfast robs Ireland not only of a gifted and skilful artist but of a fascinating and long-standing link with our topographical literary past. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Piper travelled the country with the writer Richard Hayward illustrating five of his books in a series called This is Ireland,writes Paul Clements.
Together the two men covered thousands of miles, first in a Singer 12 before moving upmarket to a Morris Minor. Visiting every county, they stopped in towns and villages meeting people, researching stories, delving into cultural history, and always making time to sample the bonhomie and raise a glass in local pubs. While Hayward was seeking out information, Piper would conjure up an evocative half-tone sketch. From Carrick-on-Shannon to Achill Island, and from the Mountains of Mourne to the Magillicuddy's Reeks, he created hundreds of loose-wristed pencil drawings to grace the pages of Hayward's books and enliven the text. They featured a wide variety of scenes: the main street of a quiet country town, the ruins of a castle, an elegant Georgian doorway, or ecclesiastical architecture such as Limerick's Franciscan Church, Christchurch Cathedral in Waterford or St Colman's Cathedral in Cobh.
The first book they worked on was Leinster and the City of Dublin (1949). This marked the start of a successful collaboration that was to last 16 years. Piper also drew the artwork for the delightful dust-jackets, including a hilarious one for Border Foray. It portrayed a rich collection of caricatures of mythological Ireland that included scantily clad dancing girls alongside the "Wilde Irishman", as well as an image of St Patrick with his face clearly modelled on Hayward's.
It was while working on the final volume Munster and the City of Cork, published in 1964, that Piper became interested in wild orchids. An obsession had been sparked. Over the next four decades he studied and drew with precision these exquisite flowers in intricate detail. He was particularly attracted to the Burren in Co Clare, which boasts 22 species of orchid along with some enigmatic variants. Piper became a champion of the Burren, visiting it regularly. In 1968 he painted a suite of wild flowers, including mountain avens, twayblade, gentian and wild strawberry, in oil on prepared boards. His original orchid drawings now hang, framed and protected under glass, in the sitting-room of the secluded Gregan's Castle Hotel near Ballyvaughan.
As they spent so much time together, the two men became close friends. Years later Piper was asked in an interview about how they got on. He replied: "We used to row like hell at times - as good friends do." Hayward had a personable writing style and his books were extremely popular. In 1964, while on his way to give a talk on folklore to Ballymena Rotary Club, he was killed in a road accident.
Aside from his busy writing career, he had also been an actor and film-maker, a broadcaster on both RTÉ and the BBC, and a ballad-singer; and if that wasn't enough, he played the harp every night. His interests included local history, folklore and legends, architecture and archaeology. His knowledge of Ireland was bred of his deep affection for a country that he had studied lovingly since a boy. This enthusiasm rubbed off on Piper and instilled in him a love for all Ireland's attributes. It was, for him, an age of discovery.
Today Hayward's books are hard to find and are highly collectable. Packed with historical facts and teeming with information, they can still be used as guidebooks, though some buildings featured in Piper's sketches have long since disappeared.
Piper was also a distinguished portrait painter. His subjects included lords mayor of both London and Belfast as well as judges, politicians, vice-chancellors and celebrities from the artistic and sporting world. He painted one of Ireland's best-known natural history writers - Robert Lloyd Praeger, author of The Way That I Went, who died in 1953. At the sitting, 60 years separated the two men: Piper was 24 when he painted Praeger in 1947, by which stage Praeger had reached 84.
For 40 years Piper lunched most days in the Wellington Park Hotel, where one of the dining areas - the Piper Bistro - was named in his honour. The hotel has a permanent exhibition of his work. Not far away, at his cluttered house in the Malone area of south Belfast, his radio was tuned to BBC Radio 3; apart from painting, botany and music, his interests included ballet and reading. He had an outstanding collection of books about rare and valuable flora of Donegal, Wicklow, Cork and Kerry, as well as a Charles Darwin first edition about the fertilisation of orchids. For those visiting his house, finding a seat was a challenge as books, magazines and newspapers were piled high on settees, chairs, stools, tables and on every inch of available floor space.
Raymond Piper was passionate, eccentric and larger than life. He spoke his mind on the issues of the day, making a considerable contribution to cultural life. Always gregarious and approachable, he was known to some as "the orchid man"; meeting him was an unforgettable experience. Brimful of ideas, he was constantly busy painting, working on a new project or planning a trip to the west of Ireland to revisit the botanical "holy ground" of the Burren.
With his sharp sense of humour, he would probably have indulged in an ironic chuckle at the ominous date of his death: Friday, July 13th.