Access
Publication Rights
Preferred Citation
Acquisition Information
Processing Information
Biography
Scope and Content
Related Materials
Contributing Institution:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Title: Eric Gill Archive
Identifier/Call Number: msGill
Physical Description:
76.2 Linear feet
114 boxes, 14 flat files, 9 tubes, 8 items
Date (inclusive): 1887-2003 (bulk
1905-1940)
Abstract: This collection of materials accumulated by the William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library documents the personal and artistic development and activities of
Eric Gill, a twentieth-century English stone-cutter, sculptor, artist, author,
typographer/type designer, printer, book illustrator; and champion of social reforms. The
collection includes manuscripts, diaries, correspondence, legal and financial documents,
scrapbooks, clippings, periodicals, photographs, Gill's books and library, as well as
several printing items and a substantial amount of art.
Physical Location: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Language of Material:
English .
Access
Collection is open for research.
Publication Rights
Copyright has not been assigned to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. All requests
for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the
Librarian. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply
permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.
Preferred Citation
[Identification of item], Collection on Eric Gill, MS Gill, William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Acquisition Information
The Clark's first Director, Lawrence Clark Powell, began collecting Eric Gill's art and
manuscripts in the late 1940s and 1950s. He arranged with a London bookseller to act as
liaison with the Gill family, which eventually designated the Clark to be the major
repository of manuscripts and correspondence. Along with the manuscripts came four hundred
volumes from the Gill's library as well as six volumes of scrapbooks and twenty folders of
press clippings. The Clark also acquired Gill's own file of magazines and journals with his
essays, articles and other contributions. Additional material has since been acquired by the
Clark Library, including a related collection of ephemera, insurance documents and
publisher's contracts and art items.
In early 2002 the Delmas Foundation provided grant funding to the Clark to arrange its
archival collection on Eric Gill. An Assistant Librarian was hired to organize, rehouse and
inventory the collection as well as to create an online finding aid in EAD for the Online
Archive of California (OAC).
Processing Information
Processed by: Jennifer Alcoset, January 2004
Biography
Son of a non-conformist minister, one of twelve children, Eric Gill was born in Brighton in
1882 and brought up in Chichester, where he attended art school and learned the rudiments of
drawing. At the age of eighteen he went to London to work in an architect's office, a
prosperous firm specializing in church buildings. Here he acquired more of a draftsman's
skills, although not entirely in sympathy with modern building methods, which Gill believed
to favor the designer and contractor at the expense of the craftsman.
The Arts and Crafts movement, then in its first flowering, offered an exciting alternative
to the "wage slavery" of the office as well as the opportunity to make his living
independently. Instead of studying architecture in the evenings, Gill learned the art of
carving inscriptions in stone. He attended classes in masonry at the Westminster Technical
School and lettering at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, both schools specializing in
practical, hands-on instruction in materials and methods. His teacher at the Central School
was Edward Johnston, an expert calligrapher and an eloquent proponent of Arts and Crafts
techniques. Gill not only shared Johnston's rooms for a few years, but even contributed a
chapter to Johnston's Writing & Illuminating & Lettering, still a standard text on
penmanship. By 1904 Gill was self-employed, supporting himself and his wife by carving
lettering on public buildings for architects as well as tombstones and memorial tablets for
private clients.
At this time, Gill's interest in art, religion, and politics were developing in diverse,
often contradictory directions. His first experiments in sculpture won the approval of such
influential artists and critics as Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, and William
Rothenstein. They admired the primitive vigor of his work and also its technical polish, a
combination that prompted flattering comparisons with archaic sculpture on one hand and the
newly fashionable Post-Impressionist art on the other. A German patron introduced him to
Aristide Maillol, hoping the two artists would work together and learn from one another.
During a brief and intense friendship with Jacob Epstein, he collaborated on the monument
for Oscar Wilde and joined in wild plans to build a modernist Stonehenge in the Sussex
countryside. On a much smaller scale, Gill carved in Hoptonwood stone a Golden Calf,
originally intended for a London cabaret but eventually loaned to Roger Fry for the Second
Post-Impressionist exhibition, where it was surrounded by paintings of Picasso, Matisse and
Cézanne.
Gill never quite renounced his heritage in the Arts and Crafts or the patronage of the
London art world, but he adamantly refused to be identified simply as a craftsman or an
artist. He constantly sought other labels, other ways to fix a special place for himself in
a society that he believed to be oppressive and unjust. He had a disputatious streak, a
craving to be heard, a compulsive urge to take sides on the social issues of his day that
could be satisfied only by sampling, asserting, and rejecting a profusion of political and
religious allegiances. He dabbled in socialism, attended meetings of the Fabian Society, and
spoke vociferously against the factory system. But he soon wearied of the discipline and
obligations of political action, left London, and joined a community of craftsmen in
Ditchling, Sussex. While at Ditchling, he and his wife converted to Catholicism, moved to
another part of the village, and founded there a reconstituted religious community linked
with the Dominican order. The Guild of SS. Joseph and Dominic operated on Distributist
rather than socialist principles, extolling the sanctity of individual labor and advocating
a return to private property and a self-sufficient rural economy. Some members of the Guild
helped Gill in the studio, others tended livestock and tilled gardens.
Sculpture continued to occupy Gill during the Ditchling period (1907-1924) - perhaps most
importantly the Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral and the War Memorial at Leeds
University - but at the same time Gill mastered other skills and developed other sources of
income. His lettering was in great demand not just for stone inscriptions, but also for
painted signs and printing, particularly buildings, title pages, and chapter headings.
Characteristically, Gill learned wood engraving to have better control over how his
lettering was printed. Once he became proficient with boxwood and graver, he began to
experiment with printmaking and book illustration, and in turn tried his hand at the
handpress, learning the first principles of typography and composition. The Guild founded
its own private press, more to make a political than an artistic statement, yet its rudely
printed broadsides and pamphlets are fetchingly illustrated with some of Gill's first
engravings.
In 1924 Gill moved his family and studio to a deserted, half-ruined monastery in South
Wales, having quit the Ditchling community in a dispute over finances. Although remote,
inconvenient, and uncomfortable, the monastery of Capel-y-ffin provided a perfect setting
for Gill to build his ideal religious community without unwelcome publicity or intrusions
from the outside world. He found a new market for his wood engravings in the Golden Cockerel
Press, publisher of far more ambitious books than the Guild, with higher standards of
presswork, better design, and a more sophisticated clientele, willing and able to pay
handsomely for sumptuously illustrated books. Increasingly intrigued by typography and its
possibilities for independent self-expression, Gill not only catered to book collectors and
bibliophiles but also to trade printers through the Monotype Corporation, which commissioned
from him a series of distinguished typefaces. This lucrative relationship seems to have
overcome his aversion for industrial capitalism, even though he was being paid by
businessmen to design types for machine composition - and on retainer at that. He also put
his business in sculpture on a sound financial footing by having his work regularly
exhibited at the Goupil Gallery in London. Assured of steady sales, he undertook one of his
largest, most impressive, and highly regarded carvings, Mankind, now at the Tate Gallery.
Some critics consider it a companion piece to the earlier Mulier at UCLA, which is equally
monumental if not a bit portentous and cold.
As his fame and business grew, so did the demands on his facilities, time, and energy.
Gill brought his family closer to London in 1928, settling at Pigotts, near High Wycombe,
Buckinghamshire, in a commodious red-brick farmhouse with outbuildings providing ample space
for studios, cottages, and a chapel. This too was intended to be a community of craftsmen,
though now defined more as employees and family members than as adherents of a religious or
political doctrine. Nevertheless Gill still attracted pupils, disciples, and pilgrims, who
came to learn from the master craftsman, to share in his sense of high purposefulness, and
to observe how he and his associates managed to live and work together apart from modern
society.
In 1929 Gill reached the highpoint of his career: several major monographs appeared on his
sculpture; a complete collection of his engravings was published in a lavishly printed
limited edition; and a selection of his polemical essays was printed at his own press
inaugurating a typeface of his own design. Within a year he suffered a breakdown from
overwork. Although he never fully recovered, he remained formidably busy during the rest of
his life. He designed and built a church, noteworthy for its stark interior and the central
placement of its altar, a practical and symbolic expression of his views on liturgy. He
carved massive public sculptures for the headquarters of BBC and of the London Underground.
The British government selected him to carve huge panels for the League of Nations building
in Geneva. Along with these prestigious commissions came more honors: he was elected an
Honorary Associate of the Institute of British Architects, and Associate of the Royal
Academy, and one of the first Royal Designers for Industry. Despite failing health, he wrote
his Autobiography during 1940 and kept hard at work to the very end. While awaiting a minor
operation, he corrected proofs of the Autobiography, sketched out some book illustrations,
started a translation of the Psalms, kept up his accounts, and wrote the last entries in his
voluminous diaries. Unexpectedly the surgery failed, and he died on November 17, 1940 at the
age of fifty-eight.
When he died in 1940, he left behind more than a thousand engravings; at least one hundred
and fifty books with his illustrations; eleven different printing types; and countless
sculptures and inscriptions on city buildings, Catholic churches, and public squares
throughout England. He harbored passionate convictions on religion, politics, and art, which
he expressed in more than two hundred articles and more than fifty books. In his own day he
was probably best known for his sculpture, his Stations of the Cross at Westminster
Cathedral, his controversial War Memorial at Leeds University, and the monumental relief
panels commissioned by the British government for the League of Nations building in Geneva.
Trained by the distinguished calligrapher Edward Johnston, Gill developed an extraordinary
skill in lettering. His vigorous sans-serif lettering is still used for tabular matter,
signage, and advertising, and his elegant Perpetua has long been a favorite display face for
fine printing.
Gill's fame nowadays rests on fine printing. The private press movement of his day opened
a natural market for his many skills, not just lettering, but also book illustration and
book design. His Four Gospels published by the Golden Cockerel Press in 1931 is considered a
modern masterpiece, joining his wood-engraved illustrations, his decorative lettering, and a
specially designed typeface in an uncanny union of image and text. A bitter foe of mass
production and industrialized society, Gill eagerly embraced the ideals of hand
craftsmanship propounded by John Ruskin and practiced by William Morris at the Kelmscott
Press. Gill collaborated with the Golden Cockerel Press on several important books and also
founded his own printing business, intended to be an outright commercial venture. Although
not exactly a private press, the firm of Hague & Gill resembles the modern equivalent in
that it bore its owner's highly individual stamp in matters of editorial policy,
manufacturing, and design. Gill retained complete artistic control over publications such as
his Twenty-Five typefaces. The UCLA Library has published an annotated checklist of Hague
& Gill imprints, based on the Clark holdings and business records.
Scope and Content
This collection of material accumulated by the Clark Library documents the personal and
artistic development and activities of Eric Gill, a twentieth-century English stone-cutter,
sculptor, artist, author, typographer/type designer, printer, book illustrator; and champion
of social reforms. The collection includes manuscripts, diaries, correspondence, legal and
financial documents, scrapbooks, clippings, periodicals, photographs, Gill's books and
library, as well as several original printing items and a substantial amount of art.
The collection is organized in nine series:
Series 1. Personal papers, 1895-1982 inclusive and undated, 3.6 linear feet
Series 2. Professional papers, 1905-1945 inclusive and undated, 16.65 linear feet
Series 3. Correspondence, 1913-1940 inclusive and undated, 12 linear feet
Series 4. Photographs 1908-1969 inclusive and undated, 6 linear feet
Series 5. Gill's books and library
Series 6. Legal and financial documents, 1900-1984 inclusive and undated, 4.66 linear
feet
Series 7. Printed material, 1909-2003 inclusive and undated, 16.29 linear feet
Series 8. Topical material, 1893-1967 inclusive and undated, 1.5 linear feet
Series 9. Addenda (2008): Correspondence with David Hennessy and Dorothy Day, with related
materials, 1935-1953 inclusive and undated, .5 linear feet.
Related Materials
The Clark Library's collection of art work by Eric Gill is cataloged in a separate guide
that is accessible online through the Online Archive of California:
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Artists--England--20th century
Catholic converts--England--20th century
Letters--England--20th century