Photo of Eric Gill by Howard Coster (1927)
National Portrait Gallery
I: Two Men With Red Beards
Eric Gill was a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence. Not only did they share many ideas and obsessions, they even looked alike. When the latter died, in 1930, Gill performed a special mass for Lawrence in the self-built chapel of his home in the Chilterns. He also produced two wood-engravings inspired by Lady Chatterley's Lover (unabashedly using himself as the model for Mellors).
This despite the fact that Lawrence in his review of Art Nonsense and Other Essays had been less than flattering, describing Gill as crude and crass; "like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in the pub" who likes to repeatedly bang his fist on the table.
To his credit, Gill accepted this criticism in good spirit, telling Frieda in a letter that her husband was probably right and admitting that he was indeed an "inept and amateurish preacher". Gill was also extremely pleased to know that at least Lawrence had agreed with his main proposition concerning the sacred nature of workmanship.
II: It All Goes Together
A key idea for Gill was integration. One of the reasons he despised modern society was that, in his view, it seemed to perpetuate discord and division. His solution was to create perfect domestic harmony; home, sweet home providing a model of the good life amidst the chaos of the world and demonstrating how everything could be made to fit like the pieces of a jigsaw: It All Goes Together was one of Gill's favourite slogans.
Unfortunately, as Gill's biographer Fiona MacCarthy writes, when you consider his quest for integration and his extraordinary home life, you soon discover aspects "which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality"; anomalies which, for one reason or another, are often ignored or glossed over by his admirers.
As MacCarthy also notes, however, to ignore Gill's complexity and contradictions - both as an artist and as a man - is ultimately to do him (and ourselves) a huge disservice.
III: Always Ready and Willing
Gill was a phallically-fixated, incestuous paedophile with a string of mistresses, happy to experiment with bestiality and cock sucking. We know this from diaries in which he recorded in explicit, quasi-scientific detail what he did with whom, when, where and how often (one of the telltale signs of a true pervert is this need to document).*
Gill preached morality and the importance of a well-regulated household that was devout and disciplined. But this didn't stop him from engaging in an anarchic succession of adulterous affairs, sleeping with his sisters, abusing his daughters, and fucking his dog. Always ready and willing, was another of the seemingly priapic Gill's favourite sayings.
The interesting thing is how, in Gill's mind, his aberrant sexual activities, his creative work and his Catholicism were, somehow, complementary; that is to say, equally important, equally holy. Which makes it extremely awkward, of course, for those who wish to separate these things in order that they might continue to enjoy the spiritual-aesthetic aspects, whilst condemning the former:
He was disgusting - but his lettering is so elegant and his designs so beautiful, as a friend recently wrote to me.
* Afterword on Gill's Diaries
Gill cheerfully records, for example, the following incidents in his diary: (i) 25 September 1916: 'Compared specimens of semen from self and spaniel under a microscope'; (ii) 12 January 1920: Went into daughter's bedroom 'stayed half-an-hour - put p. in her a/hole'; (iii) 22 June 1927: 'The shape of the head of a man's erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered - now I know'; and, finally, (iv) 13 December 1929: 'Discovered that a dog will join with a man'.
MacCarthy puts his bestial fascination and, indeed, his experiments with paedophilia, incest and fellatio, down to an urge "to try things out, to push experience to the limits ..." and suggests they should be seen as an "imaginative overriding of taboos" on the part of a highly creative and curious individual with an unusually avid appetite for sex. As such, says MacCarthy, these acts are not so very unusual, not so absolutely shocking, nor even especially horrifying - which is certainly a very liberal and generous reading, to say the least.
See: Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989). All the biographical information, including the lines from Gill's diaries, are taken from this work. The diaries themselves are located in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. Copies can be found in the Archive of the Tate Gallery, London.
Eric Gill was a great admirer of D. H. Lawrence. Not only did they share many ideas and obsessions, they even looked alike. When the latter died, in 1930, Gill performed a special mass for Lawrence in the self-built chapel of his home in the Chilterns. He also produced two wood-engravings inspired by Lady Chatterley's Lover (unabashedly using himself as the model for Mellors).
This despite the fact that Lawrence in his review of Art Nonsense and Other Essays had been less than flattering, describing Gill as crude and crass; "like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in the pub" who likes to repeatedly bang his fist on the table.
To his credit, Gill accepted this criticism in good spirit, telling Frieda in a letter that her husband was probably right and admitting that he was indeed an "inept and amateurish preacher". Gill was also extremely pleased to know that at least Lawrence had agreed with his main proposition concerning the sacred nature of workmanship.
II: It All Goes Together
A key idea for Gill was integration. One of the reasons he despised modern society was that, in his view, it seemed to perpetuate discord and division. His solution was to create perfect domestic harmony; home, sweet home providing a model of the good life amidst the chaos of the world and demonstrating how everything could be made to fit like the pieces of a jigsaw: It All Goes Together was one of Gill's favourite slogans.
Unfortunately, as Gill's biographer Fiona MacCarthy writes, when you consider his quest for integration and his extraordinary home life, you soon discover aspects "which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality"; anomalies which, for one reason or another, are often ignored or glossed over by his admirers.
As MacCarthy also notes, however, to ignore Gill's complexity and contradictions - both as an artist and as a man - is ultimately to do him (and ourselves) a huge disservice.
III: Always Ready and Willing
Gill was a phallically-fixated, incestuous paedophile with a string of mistresses, happy to experiment with bestiality and cock sucking. We know this from diaries in which he recorded in explicit, quasi-scientific detail what he did with whom, when, where and how often (one of the telltale signs of a true pervert is this need to document).*
Gill preached morality and the importance of a well-regulated household that was devout and disciplined. But this didn't stop him from engaging in an anarchic succession of adulterous affairs, sleeping with his sisters, abusing his daughters, and fucking his dog. Always ready and willing, was another of the seemingly priapic Gill's favourite sayings.
The interesting thing is how, in Gill's mind, his aberrant sexual activities, his creative work and his Catholicism were, somehow, complementary; that is to say, equally important, equally holy. Which makes it extremely awkward, of course, for those who wish to separate these things in order that they might continue to enjoy the spiritual-aesthetic aspects, whilst condemning the former:
He was disgusting - but his lettering is so elegant and his designs so beautiful, as a friend recently wrote to me.
* Afterword on Gill's Diaries
Gill cheerfully records, for example, the following incidents in his diary: (i) 25 September 1916: 'Compared specimens of semen from self and spaniel under a microscope'; (ii) 12 January 1920: Went into daughter's bedroom 'stayed half-an-hour - put p. in her a/hole'; (iii) 22 June 1927: 'The shape of the head of a man's erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered - now I know'; and, finally, (iv) 13 December 1929: 'Discovered that a dog will join with a man'.
MacCarthy puts his bestial fascination and, indeed, his experiments with paedophilia, incest and fellatio, down to an urge "to try things out, to push experience to the limits ..." and suggests they should be seen as an "imaginative overriding of taboos" on the part of a highly creative and curious individual with an unusually avid appetite for sex. As such, says MacCarthy, these acts are not so very unusual, not so absolutely shocking, nor even especially horrifying - which is certainly a very liberal and generous reading, to say the least.
See: Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, (Faber and Faber, 1989). All the biographical information, including the lines from Gill's diaries, are taken from this work. The diaries themselves are located in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. Copies can be found in the Archive of the Tate Gallery, London.
Readers who are interested, might also like to see D. H. Lawrence's 'Review of Eric Gill's Art Nonsense and Other Essays' in Introductions and Reviews, ed. Neil Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005). This is believed to be the last work written by Lawrence before his death on March 2nd, 1930. Frieda sent the MS to Gill in 1933.
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