We can ask ourselves, in examining the work and life of that craftsman, was Gill a special kind of man or a special kind of artist? The answers come back with the clarity and punch of a Gill typefaceโhe was indeed both. Born on February 22, , the son of Arthur Tidman Gill, originally a Congregationalist minister, later a clergyman of a Calvinist Methodist sect and eventually an Anglican rector, Eric Gill was the eldest of twelve children.
His mother, Rose King, was a singer on the light opera stage who performed under the name Rose le Roi. Gill inherited his artistic ability and obsessive neatness from his father and his energy for life from his mother, who was able to indulge her singing talents while still caring for twelve children all born within fifteen years.
He exhibited early promise in the arts with his fine drawings of locomotives done at the switchyard in Brighton, the town of his birth. His enthusiasm for the academic disciplines of school was tepid but he learned to appreciate fine literature from his family. Gill remembered and emulated the noble poverty of his childhood throughout his life, and though he possessed little, he was genuinely content. For the first time his father took him to visit an Anglican church during services.
For the uncomfortable character of that church was not indicative of mere poverty but of the presence of the poor! In his father joined the Church of England, with the rest of the family soon to follow. They moved to Chichester, where his father would undertake theological studies. This was a momentous shift in urban perspective for the sensitive young boy, from the bleak suburbs and slums of Brighton to the medieval cathedral city.
Gill saw it this way:. I had not been training myself to become an engineer, I had been training myself to see Chichester, the human city, the city of God, the place where life and work and things were all in one and all in harmony.
