Eric Gill: Lust for Letter & Line
- Artist: Eric Gill
- Published: 2011
- Publisher: British Museum Press, London
- Edition: -
- Format: Paperback
- Height: 19cm
- Pages: 112
- Illustrations: Illustrated in colour and black & white throughout
£9.99
Add to basketEric Gill: Lust for Letter & Line
An outsider and a radical, Gill became one the establishment’s favourite artists, with his patrons including the Catholic Church, the Lord Chancellor’s office, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Mint, the London Underground, the BBC, the Post Office and the League of Nations.
In this new Eric Gill art book the authors illuminate the quality, complexities and contradictions of Gill’s fascinating life and art and include many illustrations to help narate their story.
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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.
