Geoffrey Robert Russell, 1902 - 1945 Portrait of Arthur Eric Rowton Gill 1882-1940 in His Studio

Geoffrey Robert Russell, 1902 - 1945

Portrait of Arthur Eric Rowton Gill 1882-1940 in his studio

Signed/Inscribed:

"Robert Russell"

oil on canvas

48 x 46 cm. (19 x 18 in.)

Gill, (Arthur) Eric Rowton (1882–1940), artist, craftsman, and social critic, was born at 32 Hamilton Road, Brighton, Sussex, on 22 February 1882, the eldest son and second of the thirteen children of the Revd Arthur Tidman Gill (1848–1933), minister of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, a Calvinist Methodist church, and his wife, (Cicely) Rose King (d. 1929), formerly a professional singer of light opera under the name Rose le Roi. His younger brother, Leslie MacDonald [Max] Gill became a noted decorative cartographer. Arthur Tidman Gill, who came from a long line of Congregational missionaries and had been born in the South Seas, had himself been a Congregational minister, but had recently left the church of his forebears, after doctrinal disagreements, to join the connexion. Eric Gill was brought up in an atmosphere of religious controversy and holy poverty that helped shape his own valiant, if not totally successful, ambition 'to make a cell of good living in the chaos of our world' (Gill, Autobiography, 282).

Gill became the greatest artist–craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter-cutter and type designer of genius, whose Gill Sans and Perpetua typefaces have continued in world-wide use for many decades; a sculptor whose powerful work initiated a return to the directness of hand carving; a draughtsman and wood-engraver of consummate subtlety and skill. In any one of these crafts Gill would be considered a prime practitioner. He was also a copious essayist and a vociferous polemicist. The energy and spread of his activity, underpinned by a fervent belief in the values of making by hand as a bastion against the dehumanizing forces of industrialization, make his achievement comparable with that of William Morris in the century before.

Brighton and Chichester, 1882–1899

Eric, named after the hero of Dean Farrar's moralistic school story Eric, or, Little by Little, later wrote affectionately of his early childhood, spent in a succession of small, tightly packed houses near the railway line in Brighton where Eric—always to be an admirer of functional engineering design—watched and drew the trains. He went intermittently to a local kindergarten kept by the Misses Browne, sisters of the Dickensillustrator Hablot K. Browne (Phiz). He then spent seven years at Arnold House, a traditional boys' preparatory school in Hove where he was 'fairly happy', although poor to mediocre in all academic subjects except arithmetic. In retrospect the uninspired regime at Arnold House quite suited his developing iconoclasm: 'I was taught nothing in such a way as to make it difficult to discard' (Gill, Autobiography, 24).

Gill's unashamed fascination with the bodily functions, especially the sexual, surfaced early. Towards the end of his schooldays, he discovered the splendours of the male erection: 'how shall I ever forget the strange, inexplicable rapture of my first experience? What marvellous thing was this that suddenly transformed a mere water tap into a pillar of fire—and water into an elixir of life?' (Gill, Autobiography, 53). His struggles to reconcile the flesh and spirit determined his later life, his writings, and his art.

In 1897 the Gill family moved to 2 North Walls, Chichester. Arthur Tidman Gill had now joined the Church of England. Eric enrolled at the Chichester Technical and Art School, where he was befriended and encouraged by the art master George Herbert Catt, winning a queen's prize for perspective drawing. But the examination-dominated art school training, designed to produce more art teachers, was irksome to a student of Gill's wide-ranging curiosity. He learned more from his explorations of Chichester itself,