Eric Gill was a British sculptor, type designer, stone carver, printmaker and writer.
While he had no direct ties to William Morris, he shared with him a passion for and a pursuit of a wide variety of design and art disciplines. Gill was a skilled type designer, wood engraver, and sculptor. Gill and Morris are tied not by their face-to-face interaction or collaboration but rather by the shared sense of design and belief in the social value of honest craft.
Eric Gill’s life and career are typified by the union of distinct and dissimilar elements. He entwined art and typography, sex and religious fervor. However, his reputation has been tarnished by the posthumous unveiling of his perversity, the sexual abuse of his daughters, and his incestuous relationships with his sisters. Despite these behaviors, his reputation as an artist is still strong. Unlike Morris’s typefaces, Gill’s are still very popular and well used. The most well known are Perpetua, Joanna, and Gill Sans.
