John Piper, Entrance to Fonthill, 1940In the 1930s, Piper became the secretary of the Seven and Five Society, a group of abstract artists, which included Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. By the end of the decade, however, he had abandoned strict abstraction in favour of a more romantic portrayal of buildings and places. This work shows the ruins of Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, which in 1796 William Beckford commissioned as his personal residence. It took five hundred