Raymond Piper:The artist and botanist Raymond Piper, who has died at the age of 84, was one of the brightest lights in the cultural life of Northern Ireland. He is justly celebrated for his portraits of the North's grandees and personalities whose features he skilfully captured on canvas. (Such commissions were his main source of income.)
But his knacks and facilities should not distract us from his genius which found its fullest expression in his botanical studies. Painstaking and passionate, documentary and at the same time visionary, his exquisite "flower portraits" open the doors of perception for both the artist and the scientist in each of us, relating the one to the other at some primordial level.
Raymond Piper was born in London in 1923 and moved to Belfast at the age of six. As a young man he attended evening classes at the Belfast College of Art. He worked for six years in Harland and Wolff's shipyard as a marine engineer ("I learned tolerance in the shipyard," he claimed).
He taught for a time at the Royal School Dungannon before becoming a full-time artist in 1948. Most people in Belfast knew he was an artist, and some even referred to him as "the orchid man". Meeting him was a vivid experience - commotion, oddball comedy, a hurly-burly of ideas and information. He illustrated a number of books about Ireland with lovely loose-wristed topographical and architectural drawings. While working on Richard Hayward's Munster and the City of Cork in 1960, he became fascinated with Ireland's wild orchids. Interest grew into obsession and for the next four decades he drove many thousands of miles all over Ireland to study and draw the various species.
In 1974 his orchid studies were exhibited in the Natural History Section of the British Museum, and in the same year he was awarded the John Lindley Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society. The Ulster Museum and the Royal Dublin Society also exhibited his work. In 1987 Blackstaff Press published Piper's Flowers, a limited edition that included five of his orchid paintings. He was a fellow of the Linnaean Society, as well as an Academician of both the Royal Ulster and the Royal Irish Academies.
It is extraordinary that in the age of photography the precision of Piper's flower paintings should generate such power. "An artist can see things more clearly than a botanist," he explained. But he was both. His paintings are important scientific and historical records as well as works of art. It must have been painful as well as exhilarating for this artist to see the world with such preternatural clarity. To quote the naturalist Michael Viney: "Quartering the Burren, the sand dunes of Donegal, the heathland of Fermanagh, his paintings are maps of his life."
At the heart of Piper's legacy are some 200 half-Imperial sheets of watercolour paper - several for each of Ireland's 30 or so orchid species. He was planning a book in which the paintings would be reproduced alongside his own scientific commentary. Although it is too late for that now, facsimile publication of the key studies remains an exciting possibility.
Another way to honour the magnitude of Piper's achievement would be to keep his magical flower paintings together in one accessible collection for the enlightenment of future generations.
Raymond Piper did not marry. He is survived by two sisters, one nephew and and two nieces.
Raymond Piper: born April 4th, 1923; died July 13th, 2007.