SILENT VILLAGE

Original British 17 inch x 11 inch Trade Advertisement from Kinematograph Weekly for the 1943 Humphrey Jennings Crown Film Unit Documentary THE SILENT VILLAGE, based upon an original idea by Dr. Fischl of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs and photographed by Chick Fowle.

The true story of the massacre of the small Czech village Lidice by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales. In the film all the parts are played by the inhabitants of the Welsh village of Cwngiedd.
“… A fine and faithful portrayal of the tragedy brought by Fascism to millions of humble homes. See this film, terrible in its terror, and be filled with holy hatred against the men perpetrating similar crimes during every day their foul system festers in Europe…” (Evening Standard)

Advert art attributed to John Piper (1903 – 1992).

Born in Epsom, Surrey on 13th December 1903, Piper was educated at Epsom College from 1917 to 1921. He became an unwilling articled clerk to his father’s firm from 1921 to 1926, but entered Richmond School of Art after the death of his father in 1926. He then studied at the Royal College of Art from 1927 to 1929. He began his topographical notebooks of English architecture in the 1920s and illustrated his father’s autobiography in 1925. He had his first exhibition, of wood engravings, at the Arlington Galleries in 1927 and was elected a member of the London group in 1933. He produced his first abstract oil painting in 1935 and the same year became art editor of the avant-garde quarterly, Axis, edited by Myfanwy Evans, whom he married two years later. He produced a leaflet cover and other adverts for Imperial Airways and joined the Group Theatre as a designer with Robert Medley in 1937. The same year John Betjeman commissioned him to illustrate the Shell Guide to Oxfordshire.

During the Second World War he painted bombed churches and other buildings and would have been the ideal choice to produce the poster for Ealing’s The Bells Go Down, a film about the wartime fire service. He was made an official war artist in 1944 and painted shipping and agricultural subjects for the Ministry of War Transport.
After the war he produced a variety of work: murals, stained glass windows, fabric design, scenery and costumes, tapestries, screen prints and lithographs. He is probably best known for his watercolours of landscapes of buildings in England, Wales, France and Italy and is widely recognized as one of the leading neo-romantic painters of the post-war period in Britain.