Eric Gill in Oxford

book review by Martin Stott

Eric Gill was a typographer, sculptor and letter-cutter of great significance in 20th-century British art. His typeface designs, such as Perpetua and Gill Sans, have been major influences on typography and book design ever since.

As well as a short introductiary biographical note, this little booklet focuses on his publicly accessible work as a sculptor and letter-cutter in and around Oxford. Organised alphabetically from Balliol College to the Wolvercote Community Orchard, it records work in seven colleges and a number of convents, chapels and churches as well as various public places. It includes work in Thame, Garsington and Boars Hill as well as the city itself.

For me, the outstanding examples of Gill’s work are the war memorials to both the British and German former students in New College Chapel, the sculpture Tobias and Sara in St John’s College library, completed in just 11 days in 1926 and the remarkable series of Stations of the Cross in St Albans Church, Charles St, in east Oxford.

They are the only Gill stations in an Anglican church, and he finished the drawings just three weeks before his death in 1940, carving nine of them himself. The author points out that station seven includes a soldier in a tin hat, a reference to the series having been created in the first year of the Second World War.

This booklet is full of little insights such as this and with its sensitive line-drawing illustrations by Edith Gollnast is a great little guide for any Oxonian or visitor with an interest in Gill.