© The Piper Estate/ Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum/ Bridgeman Art Library
This startling collage by Piper is an architectural capriccio, and only the house at the centre with its Italianate pediment and tower can now certainly be identified at Cheltenham.
On the skyline is the wonderful Gothic Revival spire of Fretherne church, alongside Fretherne Court, some miles away from Cheltenham but in the same county. This confrontation of distant places is odd, and it may be that this collage was intended to be published in the Shell Guide to Gloucestershire of 1939. This collage was among his first paintings to unite distinctive buildings in an imaginative design.