Eric Gill
- Artist: Eric Gill
- Published: 2003
- Publisher: Faber & Faber, London
- Edition: -
- Format: Paperback
- Height: 27cm
- Pages: 356
- Illustrations: Illustrated throughout in black and white
£20.00
Add to basketEric Gill
Eric Gill was perhaps the greatest English artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a typographer and lettercutter of genius and a master in the art of sculpture and wood-engraving.
In this Eric Gill biography, the problems and contradictions of Gill the man and Gill the artist are examined.
'A wonderfully detailed account of his personality - so vivid, you feel you know just what it would have been like to visit him at one of his patriarchal communes . . . A Dominican, dining with the Gills, once thought he saw a nimbus shining around Eric's head. Despite the sexual improprieties it unearths, MacCarthy's authoritative biography allows you to understand how someone might have thought that.'
John Carey, Sunday Times
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Authors Biography
With her widely acclaimed book Eric Gill, published in 1989, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain. John Carey called it ‘a wonderfully detailed account of Gill’s personality - so vivid, you feel you know just what it would have been like to visit him at one of his patriarchal communes’.
Her biography of Byron was described by A. N. Wilson as ‘a flawless triumph’ and by Mark Bostridge as ‘one of the great literary biographies of our time’.
Also a well-known broadcaster and critic, Fiona MacCarthy writes for the Guardian and is currently working on the sequel to her life of William Morris - an eagerly anticipated new biography of Edward Burne-Jones.
Artists Biography
(b Brighton, 22 Feb 1882; d Harefield, Middx [now in London], 17 Nov 1940). English sculptor, letter-cutter, typographic designer, calligrapher, engraver, writer and teacher. He received a traditional training at Chichester Technical and Art School (1897–1900), where he first developed an interest in lettering. He also became fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon and Norman stone-carvings in Chichester Cathedral. In 1900 Gill moved to London to become a pupil of William Douglas Caröe (1857–1938), architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. He took classes in practical masonry at Westminster Institute and in writing and illuminating at the Central School of Art and Design, where he was deeply influenced by the calligrapher Edward Johnston. Johnston’s meticulous training was to be a perfect preparation for Gill’s first commissions for three-dimensional inscriptions in stone, the foundation stone for Caröe’s St Barnabas and St James the Greater in Walthamstow, London, and the lettering for the lychgate at Charles Harrison Townsend’s St Mary’s, Great Warley, Essex. Further commissions followed after Gill left Caröe in 1903 to work with E. S. Prior of the Art Workers’ Guild. He also undertook his first typographical work, for example for Heal’s advertisements.
