ERIC GILL (1882-1940)
MODERN BRITISH (20th Century ) Biography

Provenance

Rene Hague, Gill's printer and married to Joanna (Joan), Gill's daughter.

Literature

Eric Gill: Sculpture, London, Lund Humphries in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1992, illustrated page 119, number 102, Publication 1992

Exhibition History

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Eric Gill Drawings and Carvings, a Centenary Exhibition, 1982, number 53, illustrated
London, Barbican Art Gallery, Eric Gill: Sculpture, 11 November 1992 - 7 February 1993, Number 102
Newtown, Powys, Oriel 31, Eric Gill: Sculpture 27 February 1993 - Late March 1993, Number 102
Leeds, City Art Gallery, Eric Gill: Sculpture, 4 April 1993 - 27 June 1993, Number 102

Description / Expertise

Eric Gill was a man who loved letters: his posthumous reputation is as much as a typographer as a sculptor. His name is more indelibly linked with typographical inventions, with designs like Gill Sans, Gill Joanna or Perpetua, than with his neglected sculptural achievements. This carved inscription, however, is a reminder of the intimate kinship enjoyed by lettering and sculpture in Gill's singular career.

In 1899 Gill met Edward Johnston, one of the most remarkable characters in the Golden Age of calligraphy and typography, which flourished in the decades before the Great War. Gill studied lettering under Johnston at the Central School of Arts & Crafts, as it was then known. (The later name, Central School of Art and Design, obscures the original connections with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement.) The inscription considered here was probably made in the first years of the century. It is rare among Gill's inscriptions in that it is carved in relief, for his letters are more usually engraved. The letters are not his own designs, as far as we know, and a few years later in his career, Gill would have been too engrossed in commissions for tombstones, memorial plaques and ecclesiastical inscriptions to have devoted such effort to a work most likely undertaken for personal pleasure or experiment. Indeed, from 1903 he started his own business as a letter-cutter and monumental mason. Perhaps this inscription would have served as an example of his skills.

The words, `Night treadeth on day', are taken from William Morris's `The wind's on the Wold...', a poem written in 1891:

`Night treadeth on day,
And for worst or best,
Right good is rest.'

The passage is based on a free translation of lines 86-7 of Book X of Homer's The Odyssey, where Odysseus relates how in the land of the Laestrygons, Night and Day intermingle.

These lines were embroidered by Morris's daughter, May, on the tester valance of his fourposter bed at Kelmscott. May was later a student of Gill's at the Central School. Between 1905 and 1907, Gill lived in Hammersmith, the home of Morris and his circle in their most politically active days. For Gill to choose a text by Morris to inscribe was most natural, as there was a great affinity between the two men, although Morris had died when Gill was still a teenager. Many of Gill's ideas about the evils of industrialism, the value of handicraft, socialism and medievalism derive closely from Morris. In 1903 Gill paid several visits to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, with which he himself would show from 1906. The Art Workers Guild, which he joined in 1905, was deeply influenced by Morris. In later years, after his conversion to Catholicism, Gill tended to downplay his debt to Morris, preferring instead to trace his pedigree to Ruskin. In The Necessity of Belief, (London 1931), Gill writes of Morris:

`That great man, that most manly of great men, as sensitive and passionate as he was fearless and hot tempered, had not the mind to see the roots of the disorder. For all his humanity he did not see at what point it was that humanity was corrupted. An agnostic in revolt against a complacent anglicanism, a socialist in revolt against a mechanical industrialism, but an unbeliever! He saw no being behind doing: he saw no city of God behind an earthly paradise: he saw joy in labour but no sacrifice.'

At the time of `Night treadeth on day', however, no such theological barrier came between the young Gill and his mentor. This inscription resonates with the romantic fervour of Gill's early attraction to Morris's poetry and politics. Gill was a man for whom the literary and formal aspects of letters were inseparable. It would not be unreasonable, perhaps, for a contemporary audience, familiar with Ian Hamilton Finlay or Tom Phillips, to view this Ketton stone carving as an inadvertent precursor of `concrete poetry'.

David Cohen, August 1989.