Raymond Piper
Raymond Piper HRUA HRHA MUniv (4 April 1923 – 13 July 2007) was British a botanist and an artist. Early life 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. In 1950 Piper won a CEMA travel award which took him to Paris for a year. 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 joined the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club in 1946 where he was twice president in 1971–1972 and 1983–1984. He became an Honorary Member in 1990. He took great interest in the flowers of Ireland especially orchids. 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. Artistic career 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 White Godess in 1948. 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. 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. 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 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