Gill, Eric, 1882-1940

English sculptor and engraver.

Arthur Eric Rowton Gill, best known as Eric Gill, was born in Brighton, Sussex on February 22, 1882 to minister Arthur Tidman Gill and light-opera singer (Cicely) Rose King. They moved to Chichester in 1897, where Gill studied at the Chichester Technical and Art School (1897-1900). In 1900, Gill moved to London to study architecture under William Douglas Caröe, taking classes in practical masonry at Westminster Institute and in lettering and illumination at the Central School of Art and Design. He was inspired by calligrapher Edward Johnston. Gill received several commissions for three-dimensional inscriptions in stone, and in 1903 ended his studies with Caröe to pursue his work in lettering under E. S. Prior of the Art Workers’ Guild.

In 1904 Gill married Ethel Hester Morse; they had three daughters (Elizabeth, Petra, and Joanna) and adopted a son (Gordion). He began teaching both letterwork and masonry, and in 1906 was elected to the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society. Around this time, he traveled to see stoneworking in Rome, Bruges, and Chartres.

In 1907 Gill moved his family to Ditchling, Sussex, where he formed an artistic community and expanded his stonework to include sculpture. The first solo exhibition of Gill's stone carvings was in January 1911 at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, followed by inclusion of his pieces in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912-1913) at the Grafton Galleries in London. The success of his sculptures on public buildings and World War I memorials in the nineteen-teens and -twenties– including his stations of the Cross for Westminster Catheldral (1914-1918)–is credited with the ensuing English revival of direct-carving stone.

In 1913 Gill and his wife converted to Catholicism, she adopted the name Mary, and they both become lay members of the Dominican Order. Fellow Catholic convert and printer Hilary Douglas Clark Pepler joined Gill’s community at Ditchling and established St. Dominic’s Press (approximately 1916). In collaboration with Pepler and artist Desmond Chute, Gill formalized the Ditchling community into the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic in 1921. Gill contributed extensive illustrations and lettering for many of the St. Dominic Press’s publications.

In 1924, due to a disagreement with Pepler, Gill relocated and established a new Catholic craft community in Capel-y-ffin, a former monastery in the Welsh Black Mountains. While at Capel-y-ffin, Gill began working with Beatrice Warde and Stanley Morison of the Monotype Corporation, designing typefaces that impacted twentieth-century typography: Perpetua, Gill Sans, Joanna, and Solus. He continued to receive commissions for sculptural work, creating The Sleeping Christ (1925), Deposition (1925), and Mankind (1927). Also during this time, he began engraving illustrations for books printed by the Golden Cockerel Press.

Capel-y-ffin's geographic remoteness proved challenging, and in 1928 the Gills moved to Piggots, near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. There Gill took on a number of large-scale sculptural jobs, including a series of carvings for the BBC Broadcasting House in London (1931), and the League of Nations building in Geneva (1935-1938). He continued to illustrate for Golden Cockerel Press and established the Hague and Gill Press with his son-in-law René Hague.

Gill authored many books over his lifetime, including: Christianity and Art (1927), Art and a Changing Civilization (1934), Money and Morals (1934), Work and Leisure (1935), The Necessity of Belief (1936), Work and Property (1937), and Eric Gill: Autobiography (1941).

After years of declining health, Gill died from lung cancer in Uxbridge on November 17, 1940. Several of his final works were incomplete at the time of his death and were finished by other artists, including the stations of the cross for St Alban's Church in Oxford and the stone altarpiece for Westminster Cathedral.

Some of Gill’s work was controversial during his lifetime due to political ideology (“Cleansing of the Temple” frieze for University of Leeds) or sexual content within the context of religion (the illustrations for Golden Cockerel Press’s The Song of Songs). Public awareness of Gill's adultery, incest, and sexual abuse of his two eldest daughters raised by Fiona MacCarthy's Eric Gill: A Lover’s Quest for Art and God. (1989), a biography which used his diaries as source material, led to a critical reassessment of Gill’s legacy.