The chapter of Guildford Cathedral is considering a “new interpretation” of two sculptures by Eric Gill to address the artist’s “abhorrent” legacy.
Statues of St John the Baptist and of Christ on the Cross which adorn the exterior of the cathedral are subject to a review, which will consider some sort of intervention “to acknowledge the wrongdoings of Gill and the pain caused to others”.
Gill, a prolific artist in the early twentieth century and prominent Catholic convert, was posthumously revealed to have sexually abused his daughters in a 1989 biography. His diaries also record incestuous relations with his sisters, as well as repeated adulteries and “sexual experimentation” with his dog. He was a significant figure in the Arts and Crafts movement and early modernism, and undertook many major public commissions, leaving a difficult legacy for the institutions responsible for this work.
Guildford Cathedral is the latest to address this controversy, which drew attention earlier in January when a man attacked Gill’s 1933 statue of Prospero and Ariel above the door of Broadcasting House. Protestors have called for the BBC to remove the statue.
Clergy and administrators in Guildford are now discussing the Gill sculptures with reference to the Church of England’s ongoing consultations on monuments connected to slavery and empire, and the support provided by the Church Buildings Council and the Cathedral Fabrics Commission for these projects.
The widespread presence of Gill’s work in public life, as well as his influence on other artists through the artistic communities at Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin, has implicated many organisations.
He designed several popular typefaces, including Perpetua and Gill Sans, the latter appearing on British Rail signage and in Penguin Classics designs, as well as BBC graphics. The charity Save the Children announced in January that it would stop using Gill Sans as the typeface in its branding.
These developments have revived the campaign to remove Gill’s Stations of the Cross from Westminster Cathedral, which began in the 1990s. The panels, a significant element in Lenten devotions at the cathedral, have been repeatedly condemned by survivors’ groups since the revelations in the 1989 biography. Its author Fiona MacCarthy, the art historian who died in 2020, disagreed with these demands: “Gill’s carvings are indeed the work of a paedophile, but that does not make them ‘paedophile art’.”
Gill’s art in Westminster Cathedral was criticised in his day. The daughter of the architect JF Bentley thought the stations were “strangely crude”, while the altarpiece he carved for the Chapel of St George and the English Martyrs originally featured a monkey next to St Thomas More, which was removed on the orders of Cardinal Bernard Griffin shortly after Gill’s death.
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