Margaret Gere, one of the leading lights in the Tempera Revival, was a self-confessed Piero acolyte, having been to Italy and studied Piero’s Triumph of Battista Sforza in the Uffizi, Florence, in 1905, the year that she enrolled at the Slade. By the 1920s,
when this work was created, passion for Piero had become mainstream – indeed the engraver Claire Leighton recalled: ‘Living, with my fellow students, in the world of early Italian painters, even to the point of dressing like figures from the world of Piero della Francesca, we did not need to search for other stimulation’. Gere’s panel is a conscientious homage rather than a pastiche. Charles Eastlake, appointed first Director of The National Gallery in 1855, purchased Piero’s Baptism of Christ in 1861.

The Baptism was included in The Barbican Art Gallery’s groundbreaking The Last Romantics exhibition, (catalogue No. 101)

John Redman, the previous owner of this painting, lived with the Payne and Gere families in their Cotswold home during the 2nd World War from 1940 to 1944. The home was a constant visiting location for a number of important artists and writers including Sir Stanley Spencer, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Sir William Rothenstein, George Bernard Shaw, John Betjeman and many others.