Gill, Eric

Gill, Eric (1882–1940). British sculptor, engraver, typographer, and writer, born in Brighton, the son of a clergyman. After studying at Chichester Art School, he was apprenticed to an architect in London from 1900 to 1903. During this period he also took evening classes in masonry at the Westminster Technical Institute and in lettering at the Central School of Art and Design, where he was taught by the celebrated calligrapher Edward Johnston (see ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART), who ‘profoundly altered the whole course of my life and all my ways of thinking'. He began to earn his living as a letter cutter in 1903 and carved his first figure piece in 1910. In 1913 he became a convert to Roman Catholicism and was commissioned to make fourteen relief carvings of the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral (1914–18). These and the Prospero and Ariel group (1929–31) on Broadcasting House, London, are his best-known sculptures. Early in his career as a sculptor, Gill sometimes collaborated with Jacob Epstein ( Gill carved the lettering for Epstein's Oscar Wilde tomb), but they later quarrelled. Like Epstein, Gill was one of the leading figures in the revival of direct carving, and his work usually has an impressive simplicity of conception; he wrote that his ‘inability to draw naturalistically was, instead of a drawback, no less than my salvation. It compelled me … to concentrate upon something other than the superficial delights of fleshly appearance … to consider the significance of things.’ In life, as in his work and writing, he was an advocate of a romanticized medievalism, and he tried to revive a religious attitude towards art and craftsmanship. His unconventionality was well known in his own time (he disliked trousers, for example, preferring to wear smocks), but the most bizarre and unpleasant aspects of his personality were not revealed until Fiona MacCarthy's biography was published in 1989: he had incestuous relationships with two of his sisters and two of his daughters and sexual congress with a dog. Apart from religion, sex is the main subject of his work.

Gill was an important figure in book design and typography as well as sculpture. He illustrated many books, notably for the Golden Cockerel Press (see GIBBINGS), and his ‘Gill Sans-Serif’ (1928) and ‘Perpetua’ (1930) typefaces are among the classics of 20th-century typography; they were commissioned for the Monotype Corporation by its consultant Stanley Morison (1889–1967), ‘Britain's greatest authority on letter-design’ (DNB). Gill's main literary works are Christianity and Art (1927), Art (1934), and Autobiography (1940), and he also wrote numerous pamphlets on art, religion, and sociology. He designed one building, the Roman Catholic church of St Peter the Apostle at Gorleston, Norfolk (1938–9), built of brick in a stripped-down Gothic style. From 1907 to 1924 he lived at Ditchling, Sussex, running the St Dominic's Press amongst other activities, and also setting up an artistic community ( David Jones was one of the members). In 1924 he moved to Capel y Ffin, Wales, and in 1928 settled at Pigotts, near High Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire.

His brother Macdonald Gill (1884–1947) was an architect, mural painter, and designer (mainly of posters and maps). The mural commissions on which he worked included a series of seven large canvases representing the pleasures of London (1911) for the students' dining room at Borough Polytechnic, London. Six painters were involved, the other five being Bernard Adeney (1878–1966), Frederick Etchells, Roger Fry (who directed the scheme), Duncan Grant (who painted two pictures), and Albert Rothenstein (who later became Albert Rutherston). Dennis Farr writes that ‘Fry regarded the project as a practical vindication of his view of the social function of art in a modern state’ (English Art 1870–1940, 1978). The dining room was demolished in 1929 and the paintings were bought by the Tate Gallery, London, in 1931. Gill's contribution is Punch and Judy. His cousin Colin Gill (1892–1940) was a painter, mainly of murals, although he also did portraits and genre subjects and was an Official War Artist in the First World War. His murals include King Alfred's Attack on Danish Invaders at Swanage, 877, part of a series painted at St Stephen's Hall in the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) in 1927 (the other artists who worked on this commission included Clausen, Monnington, and Philpot). In 1939 Gill went to South Africa to paint murals in the Magistrates' Court, Johannesburg, and he died there the following year before completing the work. With his wife Una Long, he wrote the novel Five Came to London (1938), under the pseudonym Richard Saxby.