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Arthur Eric Rowton Gill (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Gill as "the greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter-cutter and type designer of genius", he is also a figure of considerable controversy following the revelations of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters and of his pet dog. Gill was born in Brighton and grew up in Chichester, where he attended the local college before moving to London. There he became an apprentice with a firm of ecclesiastical architects and took evening classes in stone masonry and calligraphy. Gill abandoned his architectural training and set up a business cutting memorial inscriptions for buildings and headstones. He also began designing chapter headings and title pages for books. As a young man, Gill was a member of the Fabian Society, but later resigned. Initially identifying with the Arts and Crafts Movement, by 1907 he was lecturing and campaigning against the movement's perceived failings. He became a Roman Catholic in 1913 and remained so for the rest of his life. Gill established a succession of craft communities, each with a chapel at its centre and with an emphasis on manual labour as opposed to more modern industrial methods. The first of these communities was at Ditchling in Sussex, where Gill established the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic for Catholic craftsmen. Many members of the Guild, including Gill, were also members of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, a lay division of the Dominican Order. At Ditchling, Gill and his assistants created several notable war memorials including those at Chirk in north Wales and at Trumpington near Cambridge, along with numerous works on religious subjects. In 1924, the Gill family left Ditchling and moved to an isolated, disused monastery at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains of Wales. The isolation of Capel-y-ffin suited Gill's wish to distance himself from what he regarded as an increasingly secular and industrialised society, and his time there proved to be among the most productive of his artistic career. At Capel, Gill made the sculptures The Sleeping Christ (1925), Deposition (1925), and Mankind (1927). He created engravings for a series of books published by the Golden Cockerel Press considered among the finest of their kind, and it was at Capel that he designed the typefaces Perpetua, Gill Sans, and Solus. After four years at Capel, Gill and his family moved into a quadrangle of properties at Speen in Buckinghamshire. From there, in the last decade of his life, Gill became an architectural sculptor of some fame, creating large, high profile works for central London buildings, including both the headquarters of the BBC and the forerunner of London Underground. His mammoth frieze The Creation of Man was the British Government's gift to the new League of Nations building in Geneva. Despite failing health Gill was active as a sculptor until the last weeks of his life, leaving several works to be completed by his assistants after his death. Gill was a prolific writer on religious and social matters, with some 300 printed works including books and pamphlets to his name. He frequently courted controversy with his opposition to industrialisation, modern commerce, and the use of machinery in both the home and the workplace. In the years preceding World War II, he embraced pacifism and left-wing causes. Biography Early life Eric Gill was born in 1882 in Hamilton Road, Brighton, the second of the 13 children of the Reverend Arthur Tidman Gill and (Cicely) Rose King (died 1929), formerly a professional singer of light opera under the name Rose le Roi. Arthur Tidman Gill had left the Congregational Church in 1878 over doctrinal disagreements and became a minister of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, a grouping of Calvinist Methodists.: 7  Arthur was born in the South Seas, where his father, George Gill, was a Congregational minister and missionary.: 5  Eric Gill was the elder brother of the graphic artist MacDonald "Max" Gill (1884–1947). Two of his other brothers, Romney and Cecil, became Anglican missionaries while their sister, Madeline, became a nun and also undertook missionary work.: 5  The film historian David Gill was a nephew. In 1897, the family moved to Chichester, when Arthur Tidman Gill left the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, became a mature student at Chichester Theological College and joined the Church of England.: 19  Eric Gill studied at Chichester Technical and Art School, where he won a Queen's Prize for perspective drawing and developed a passion for lettering.: 26  Later in his life, Gill cited the Norman and medieval carved stone panels in Chichester Cathedral as a major influence on his sculpture. In 1900 Gill became disillusioned with Chichester and moved to London to train as an architect with the practice of W. D. Caröe, specialists in ecclesiastical architecture with a large office close to Westminster Abbey. London 1900–1907 Frustrated with his architectural training, Gill took evening classes in stonemasonry at the Westminster Technical Institute and, from 1901, in calligraphy at the Central School of Arts and Crafts while continuing to work at Caröe's. The calligraphy course was run by Edward Johnston, creator of the London Underground typeface, who became a strong and lasting influence on Gill.: 42  For a year, until 1903, Gill and Johnston shared lodgings at Lincoln's Inn in central London.: 49  During 1903, Gill gave up training in architecture to become a calligrapher, letter-cutter and monumental mason. After making a copy of a small stone tablet from Westminster Abbey, Gill's first public inscription was for a stone memorial tablet, to a Percy Joseph Hiscock, in Chichester Cathedral.: 45  Through a contact at the Central School, Gill was employed to cut the inscription for a tombstone at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.: 45  Other work quickly followed, including an inscription for Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, plus commissions from architects and private individuals, including Count Kessler.: 93  Kessler, on Johnston's recommendation, employed Gill to design chapter headings and title pages for the Insel Verlag publishling house. W.H. Smith & Son employed Gill to paint the lettering on the fascias of several of their bookshops including, in 1903, their Paris store.: 55  For a time, Gill combined this work with his job at Caröe's but eventually the scale and frequency of these commissions required him to leave the company.: 88  After Gill died, his brother, Evan, compiled an inventory of 762 inscriptions known to have been carved by him.: 45  In 1904 Gill married Ethel Hester Moore (1878–1961), a former art student, later known as Mary, the daughter of a businessman who was also the head verger at Chichester Cathedral.: 31  Gill and Moore would eventually have three daugh.... Discover the Eric Gill popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Eric Gill books.