Gill

Adam and Eve?

Time to draw the Eric Gill business to a close with report of some recent ramblings.

To start, I think that the thought of Gill which has really struck home with me is his idea that in carving a letter in stone you are carving the thing itself. You are making a letter, you are not making a sign, a symbol or an image of something else.

Then he did not like the practise, common when he was young, of specifying the work of stone masons in full size drawings and leaving nothing for their skill, imagination and verve. These masons were not able to take advantage of the twists and turns of the particular bit of stone that they happened to be working on. Or of their better knowledge of the intended settings, perhaps some obscure corner of some ancient church. They were just expected to realise what someone else had conceived and specified.

One result of which was that the architect or designer was apt to lose touch with the medium: much better to combine the two, at least to the extent of the designer cutting the mason a bit of slack. I remember being told, say fifteen years ago, that lots of work in our Royal Colleges is still done in this way, with the young and callow artists handing over their designs for execution by technicians. Although to be fair to the lady who told me this, she did not care for the practise at all. She liked to do her own execution.

One result for Gill of which was that he got lots of inscriptional work from people like architects who did not want to have to bother with full sized drawings and who could trust Gill to do good work from much less. And he made a point of keeping his charges low.

But he did like to talk, to preach, to lecture and to write. He loved having an audience. And in his pre-television age, audience there was. But a lot of his talk, particularly when he gets going about his adult-acquired Roman faith, is rather tiresome. No coincidence that there are echoes of his views in some of the work of his contemporary G. K. Chesterton, whose autobiography sits on my shelf, half read. All of which leaves me with the feeling that the man was a star at carving inscriptions in stone – gravestones being a good bread-and-butter item for which there was steady demand – but that his touch became less certain the further he strayed from his core skill, his core talent.

He was also a great one for new beginnings, moving home and large household a number of times during his career. New beginnings perhaps, when the then current wheeze for heaven on earth fell short. Or perhaps when there was a row with one of his colleagues or collaborators. Relations with whom were sometimes a bit more rocky than reading the autobiography might suggest.

Something of a whiff of the near contemporary Pre-Raphaelites about Gill. Starts off as the enfant terrible, against everything the art establishment stands for and end up as a pillar of that very establishment. And not just the Pre-Raphaelites; a well worn trajectory in many walks of life. I think even Dame Trace is CBE, RA these days; the dame of tripe and trash. Or perhaps Dame Dumpster. See reference 8.

Part of all this is the inevitable tension between the artist and the patron. The artist is rarely able or wanting to work in a vacuum. He wants his work to be consumed, to be bought. He needs to make a living. And for that he has to interact with the world of art – which he might affect to despise. As someone observes in one of the various versions of the Forsyte saga, particularly difficult for architects, whose work, that is to say buildings, is very expensive in itself. Much dearer than stone for graves or wood blocks for engravings. However, Gill had a number of good patrons to help him on his way. Both worldly and wealthy.

I might add in passing that my own belief is that constraint in the form of paying customers is good, one gets better work in consequence. Work without constraints is all too apt to go over the top.

Nevertheless, for all his craft, there is a rather crude quality to some of his work, which I first noticed in his early but very well known commission for the stations of the cross at Westminster Cathedral. Crude in the sense of sloppy, careless execution. Almost the work of a child rather than the craftsman he usually was. Crudity which is perhaps the result of spreading himself a bit thin, trying his hand at so many different things – and so much of it.

That said, Gill was in the vanguard (as it were) of the rear guard action of the wood engravers, then in danger of succumbing to the new technology of their day. In the course of which he was one of the promoters of the idea of a wood engraving as a medium of its own, with strong curves, blacks and whites, rather than a medium in which to imitate drawings in ink or pencil, its main use in the nineteenth century (ask for Dalziel). With an example of his lateral thinking reported on page 186 of reference 3 being his practise of sometimes printing his wood blocks by rubbing the ink into the cuts, rather than over the raised areas of uncut block, rather in the way of a copper plate, although I have not yet been able to find an example of this in reference 2. A technical point on which I have an outstanding action.

All in all, an interesting excursion.

PS 1: intriguing how some lady biographers seems to have both taste and talent for unearthing the seedy private lives of eminent gentlemen. With this one perhaps qualifying for the modern term ‘sexaholic’ of reference 9 – which some of his contemporaries found tiresome, despite the free and easy ways of the chattering classes between the wars. Brenda Maddox comes to mind. Also the verdict of Sergeant Lewis’s old dad who said something about ‘watch the footballer not the man’. An episode of Morse involving a lady opera singer with a seedy private life.

PS 2: I should declare an interest in that I have some privileged knowledge of the affairs of the late David Kindersley, one of Gill’s apprentices, who went on to take up residence with his third wife in a converted school in Cambridge. Not respectable in that he was a conscientious objector in the second world war, respectable in that his son was half of the Dorling Kindersley publishing operation. An independent operation which overreached itself and was eventually swallowed up by Random House.

Reference 1: Autobiography – Eric Gill – 1941.

Reference 2: Eric Gill’s Masterpieces of Wood Engraving – Berona – 2013. More than enough here for me, at a sensible price. No need for all the scribblings, obscene and otherwise, which make it to the collected works mentioned, for example, at reference 6.

Reference 3: Eric Gill – Fiona MacCarthy – 1989.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=gill. Lots of stuff, too much to include in the first return.

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=eric+gill. Searching for ‘gill’ alone dredged up all kinds of wrong gills. No many true positives at all.

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=gill. Just the one hit here, from back in 2008. From all of which we deduce that the gill fad is indeed a relatively new fad. Previously aware but not terribly interested.

Reference 7: The Wood Engravings of Robert Gibbings – Patience Empson – 1959. MacCarthy reports Gill having a swing-in with Gibbings and his wife at some point. Plenty of flesh on view here, but Gibbings avoids in his work the pornography which mars that of Gill.

Reference 8: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=dame+trace+detritus.

Reference 9: https://www.sa.org/.

Reference 10: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=houellebecq+quixote. Another of the echoes mentioned above.

Reference 11: Diary - Eric Gill - most of his adult life. A detailed diary, only lightly censored by his wife at his death, an important source for MacCarthy. I subscribe to the view that people who keep diaries, however secret during their life, may, in the case that they survive, be presumed to want them read afterwards.

Group search key: erc.