Born in Brighton, Arthur Eric Rowton Gill is one of 13 children. He studies at Chichester Technical and Art School, before becoming a trainee architect in London. Wooden doll, carved by Eric Gill for his daughter Petra, 1910. Photograph: Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft

Do we like them the less knowing, as we know now, that during those years at Ditchling, Gill was habitually abusing his two elder daughters? When in 1980 I came upon the evidence, up to then suppressed, in Gill's private diaries in the University of California at Los Angeles, I cannot say I was totally surprised. The flesh-and-spirit tensions in his work are palpable: this was what had in the first place attracted me to Gill as the subject for critical biography. In his portraits of his children, I was already conscious of a sort of overbalance of tendresse. Video of a Lecture at London University detailing Gill's interest in Indian Sculpture". London University School of Advanced Study. March 2012.

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A quiet English librarian who spent his days pottering around Hull, Philip Larkin happened to be the greatest poet of his generation. His humane and grounded verse won him admirers across the world. It also disguised a nastier side. In his private correspondence to Kingsley Amis, Larkin wrote some rather vile things.

Gill was commissioned to develop a typeface with the number of allographs limited to what could be used on Monotype systems or Linotype machines. The typeface was loosely based on the Arabic Naskh style but was considered unacceptably far from the norms of Arabic script. It was rejected and never cut into type. [69] [70] [71] Published works [ edit ] Illustration from the book The Devil's devices, or, Control versus Service by Hilary Pepler, 1915 Gill was one of the most respected artists of the 20th Century. His statue Prospero and Ariel adorns the BBC's Broadcasting House and the Creation of Adam is in the lobby of the Palais des Nations, now the European HQ of the United Nations in Geneva. I think the problem is that these works frighten people. They are reminders of the complexity of human life. We would much prefer it if our "monsters" could only do monstrous things as it helps us catagorise them. If the monsters are instead capable of also doing good things then it makes us feel more uncomfortable as it makes us think of them as human with both human talents and human failings.

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I think there is no need to destroy any genius' work? I agree that it may be disturbing for the victims yet how can one destroy a masterpiece for personal reasons? Secondly, I think an artist¿s personal and professional life should never be mixed up. A number of professional craft workers joined the community, such that by the early 1920s the community had grown to 41 people, occupying several houses in the 20 acres surrounding the Guild's chapel and workshops. [2] :148 Notable visitors to the Common included G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, whose Distributist ideas the Guild followed. [14] Some young men who had been in combat in World War I came to stay for longer periods. These included Denis Tegetmeier, Reginald Lawson and the artist and poet David Jones, who was to become engaged for a time to Gill's second daughter, Petra. [2] :151 There are those who would defend Davey's books. Teachers who value the texts explain their position on internet forums. Essentially, the books are useful and contain nothing untoward - it's only the association with Davey that casts a shadow over the content. And perhaps it could be argued that there is an important distinction between an intellectual work like this and art. A manual does not demand a sense of allegiance. It does not provoke exalted feelings in the user or a sense of celebration as some art does.

Naturally, the people doing all this objecting often know very little about Gill, save for the fact of his paedophilia, and they trade in misinformation and hearsay. One of those I speak to while researching this piece, for instance, tells me confidently of a protest against Gill’s work by some university students (this, she says, was how she first learned of his abuse of his daughters). But when I try to confirm her story, it pretty much crumbles to dust. Margaret Kennedy, a campaigner for Ministers and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors, calls for the removal of Gill’s Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral. “The very hands that carved the Stations were the hands that abused,” Kennedy says. To his step-daughter Antoinette Lyons, now 33, the two are inseparable. She has waived the anonymity accorded to victims of sexual abuse to call for his books to be withdrawn: "In my opinion they were written with one aim - to get to children."

1882–1940

The diaries also revealed a dark dimension to some of Gill’s sculptures. A semi-pornographic one in the Tate Britain known as F—king was discovered to be of Gill’s younger sister Gladys and her husband. At the time it was made, Gill was having an incestuous fling with Gladys. Sketches he made of his prepubescent daughter bathing also turned out to have been done around the time he was abusing her. Gill's 1935 essay All Art is Propaganda marked a complete reversal of his previous belief that artists should not concern themselves with political activity. [2] :272 He became a supporter of social credit and later moved towards a socialist position. [36] In 1934, Gill contributed art to an exhibition mounted by the left-wing Artists' International Association, and defended the exhibition against accusations in The Catholic Herald that its art was "anti-Christian". [37] Gill became a regular speaker at left-wing meetings and rallies throughout the second half of the 1930s. [2] :273 He was adamantly opposed to fascism, and was one of the few Catholics in Britain to openly support the Spanish Republicans. [36] Gill became a pacifist and helped set up the Catholic peace organisation Pax with E. I. Watkin and Donald Attwater. [38] Later, Gill joined the Peace Pledge Union and supported the British branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. [36] The Creation of Man, 1938 a b Stephen Stuart-Smith (2003). "Gill, (Arthur) Eric (Rowton)". Grove Art Online. doi: 10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T032249 . Retrieved 21 January 2022. Journalist and author Alex Larman said: “The news that the Ditchling museum is removing Gill is both depressing and predictable. Gill and Ditchling are inextricably interlinked, and it would be a shortsighted act of folly for the museum to attempt to airbrush the village’s most famous inhabitant from its cultural history. The latest statue to provoke the ire of the British public is one by Eric Gill, a sculptor and printmaker who died in 1940.