Friends, relations, colleagues and former pupils of Eric Gill were among the participants in two centenary events held last week.

After hearing the homage paid to Eric Gill’s art and way of life at last week’s two centenary events, it came as a shock to read what some of his detractors had to say about him, as recorded in the biography by Robert Speaight.

‛Eric Gill is dead’, a former patron (Sir Michael Sadler) noted in his diary in 1940. ‛A fine draughtsman, a vain poseur, a tiresome writer. . . .’

A contemporary critic wrote of Gill’s major work, the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, that ‛instead of assimilating the severity of an archaic style’ the sculptor had ‛merely adopted its incidental ugliness’.

There is not a single mention of Gill in the encyclopedic Sculpture: 19th & 20th Centuries (Michael Joseph, 1967), although the book has 349 illustrations of the work of 160 sculptors.

Though by no means universally admired during his lifetime, Gill was certainly a celebrity, and was once described by G.K. Chesterton as ‛one of the greatest men alive’.

The slump in his reputation for several decades after his death accounts for the fact that (according to one speaker’s estimate) about 80 per cent of his work is now in America, at universities in Los Angeles and Austin (Texas) and a library in San Francisco.

The centenary has brought a great revival of appreciation as well as interest and last week’s two events were both well attended. These were a day-long ‛Colloquium’ at Chichesteron Monday and the 1982 Beatrice Warde lecture, ‛Eric Gill and the Search for Reality’, given by Father Brocard Sewell on Wednesday 6 October in London.

Sir Michael Sadler’s resentment of Gill was due to the artist’s behaviour over the design and dedication of the war memorial commissioned for Leeds University, of which Sadler was Vice-Chancellor, and the episode (1922–23) brought together rows of the strands (except sex) in Gill’s life: sculpture, lettering, clothing reform, pacifism, anti-industrial philosophy, religion and polemics.

The low relief sculpture depicts Christ driving the money-changers from the Temple, because this was an example of the Christian use of violence. The main figure wears a robe while the usurers are in modern dress, including spats (Gill’s comment: ‛Bootlaces would have cost you much more’), and the inscription (in Latin) from the Epistle of St. James, reads: ‛Go now you rich men, weep and howl in your miseries which shall come upon you. Your riches are putrid.’

Gill not only changed the design without consulting his patron but also sent an anti-capitalist pamphlet to the local press at a crucial moment, when Sadler had succeeded in persuading the big men of Leeds to accept the subject.

Uncompromising in his beliefs, Gill shared the independent attitude of his friend Stanley Morison, who once said of the Monotype Corporation: ‛I don’t work for them, they work for me!’

At the Chichester conference, Gill’s nephew and last apprentice, John Skelton, himself a sculptor of considerable repute, endearingly referred to his subject as ‛Uncle Eric’ and ‛my Master’ in the course of an illustrated lecture on Gill’s sculpture. To an outsider, the unaffected respect shown by Skelton and other ex-pupils for a man who died more than 40 years ago was impressive and indeed moving.

Acknowledging the truth of the criticism that Gill’s sculpture, like his drawings, reveals a two-dimensional view and generally lacks ‛volume’. Skelton praised his profound understanding of the material. As Gill himself wrote. his works ‛are of stone in their inmost being as well as their outermost existence’. Contrary to modern practice he did not use a pointing machine (pantograph) but carved directly.

Lettering was only a part of Gill’s work and his type designs, for which he is most widely known, were only a very small part of his lettering work, as James Mosley pointed out in his contribution to the Colloquium. An analysis of Gill Sans, which has a great deal of subtlety in its achievement of a simple effect, formed the most interesting part of this illustrated lecture, but Mosley also took due note of what Fr. Sewell called Gill’s ‛metaphysical’ mentality by quoting the artist’s description of his feelings on watching his master Edward Johnston at work: It was ‛as though a secret of heaven were being revealed’.

Johnston was one of many craftsmen who had a connection with the Guild of Crafts at Ditchling, where Gill and friends tried with some success to put their Distributist ideas into practice. Distributism, also known by the more explanatory title of Agrarianism, is defined by Webster as ‛The theory or practice of distributing private property (as land) to the maximum degree among individual owners’.

This political philosophy, which is fundamentally anti-industrial, made Gill an ‛extremist of the centre’, bitterly opposed to both capitalism and communism. Ownership was a condition of liberty and industrial workers everywhere had been reduced to ‛a subhuman condition of intellectual irresponsibility’. In one of the more successful of his many books and pamphlets. The Necessity of Belief (1936), Gill neatly puts both enemies in their place.

They (the Communists) have thown away the god whom capitalists profess to worship and do not, and have accepted the servitude which capitalism has developed and perfected but whose existence capitalists deny . . . They have retained the bath water while emptying out the baby.

In another passage from the book, quoted by Fr. Sewell, he defines freedom as working for God by doing ‛what we want to do in our working hours and what is required for us in our free time’, while the converse, which meant working for one-self, was slavery. Fortunate in his talents, Gill always had great contempt for ‛the notion that leisure was preferable to work’ and his output was prolific—more than a thousand wood engravings, for example.

Religion was also absolutely central to Gill’s life and the commentator, however ill-qualified, must make some reference to Fr. Sewell’s remarks on this theme.

Surprisingly enough, the seed of Gill’s conversion from a kind of woolly Fabianism, to which he had turned after a strictly Nonconformist upbringing, towards Roman Catholicism, is said to have been a reading of Robert Browning’s long blank-verse poem, Bishop Blougram’s Apology. (Fr. Sewell commented that even this conversion was a kind of nonconformism in England at the time.)

In the poem a worldly bishop follows Pascal in recommending faith on prudential grounds (everything to gain, nothing to lose). ‛What have we gained then by our unbelief, he asks, ‛but a life of doubt diversified by faith, for one of faith diversified by doubt?’

Despite its occasional obscurities the bishop’s discourse includes some lapidary statements, for example:

My business is not to remake myself,
But make the absolute best of what God made.

Trite but true, this might have been Gill’s motto and he later produced a booklet of the poem complete with exegesis at the Hague & Gill press, High Wycombe. (A copy was sold at auction last year for £50)

There can be no doubt about the sincerity of Gill’s religious beliefs, which led him to become a lay member of the Dominican Order, but these and his attempts to form ‛a cell of good living in the chaos of our world’ certainly did not make him into a cloistered recluse. By the time he was 30 he had met on familiar terms a great variety of the literary and artistic personalities of the time: H.G. Wells, Orage of The New Age, Max Beerbohm, Augustus John, also Rupert Brooke (‛Atheistical beggar’, he noted in his diary—but subsequently carved Brooke’s memorial tablet for Rugby School).

Most of those who do not follow Gill’s faith would probably not have any doubts about the source or proper use of man’s gifts but more about the unevenness of their distribution. Immensely talented, above all in his mastery of the design, carving and perfect arrangement of roman letter, Gill also had a great gift of inspiring affection, as witnessed by many speakers at the Colloquium whose names we have not the space to mention.

One of them told a story which illustrated his sense of humour, without which he might have been formidable but unlovable person.

While at work on a carving,sitting on a raised platform, he was asked by a visitor: ‛Mr Gill, do you mind if I come up there and watch you work?’ ‛Not a bit!’ quoth Eric. ‛So long as you don’t mind me not liking you sitting up here and watching me work!’