More is known about the private lives of artists - not least because many draw on their experiences for their work - so moral dilemmas will continue to arise. In Gill's case the outrage has not significantly undermined his status. The BBC uses Gill Sans typefaces in corporate branding and Westminster Cathedral retains its Stations of the Cross. Wooden doll, carved by Eric Gill for his daughter Petra, 1910. Photograph: Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft

Gill was made a Royal Designer for Industry, the highest British award for designers, by the Royal Society of Arts; and he was a founder-member of the newly established Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry. He died from lung cancer (he had been an inveterate smoker) on 17 November 1940. Further information can be found from Wikipedia, Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft or The National Archives. The atmosphere was friendly and committed, but also subdued. My sense was – I made notes to this effect – that people were slightly uneasy. Perhaps they were worried that, for all their expertise, they did not have the right language to discuss Gill’s behaviour towards his older daughters, Betty and Petra (a sheet we were given on arrival informed us, for instance, that some organisations working in this field believe it is better to use the terminology “a person who has experienced violence” than the words “victim” or “survivor”). Or perhaps they feared how they might sound to others – hard-hearted? Politically incorrect? – were they to be anything less than sombre. Either way, they seemed rather earnest. On the few occasions when nervous laughter did bubble up, it was as if a window had been opened, the room filling briefly with what felt like a blast of clean, fresh air. Eric Gill’s Girl in Bath II, 1923 – the model for which was his daughter Petra. Photograph: Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft The sculptures adorning the 1932 Art Deco building were carved by an artist of the Arts and Crafts movement, Eric Gill, who died in 1940. The most prominent statue stands over the original entrance and depicts a young boy in front of an older man, representing Ariel and Prospero from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. From the end of 1939 into the middle of 1940, Gill had a series of illnesses, including rubella, but managed to write his autobiography that summer. [1] Gill died of lung cancer in Harefield Hospital in Middlesex on the morning of Sunday 17 November 1940 and, after a funeral mass at the Pigotts chapel, was buried in Speen's Baptist churchyard. [1]a b Stephen Stuart-Smith (2003). "Gill, (Arthur) Eric (Rowton)". Grove Art Online. doi: 10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T032249 . Retrieved 21 January 2022. What is striking is that once the immediate commotion over Gill's sexual aberrations had died down, there was a new surge of interest in his work. The 1992 retrospective at the Barbican finally demolished the patronising view of Gill as a Catholic sculptor, setting him in the mainstream of modern British art. The monumental architectural carvings made in Gill's Pigotts period in the 1930s, such familiar elements in the London street scene that they were in danger of being overlooked, emerged with a new clarity. Prospero and Ariel outside the BBC building in Portland Place; the large-scale East Wind sculpture that hovers over St James's Underground station: these are weirdly wonderful examples of Gill's work.

Pilkington doesn’t feel that knowing Gill’s biography spoils our enjoyment of his work: if anything, it only deepens it; and in the coming weeks, she won’t shy away from telling people so. “This is a bit hard to say,” she tells me, in her east London studio, surrounded by body parts and unseeing eyes, “but the thing I feel behind all of Gill’s work is the libidinous drive of being an artist. When he carved his first figure, he wrote down in excited detail what it felt like to breathe life into material. It was sexual and intimate and God-like, this making of things that could be living, breathing bodies.” She rubs the tips of her fingers together. “That complete obsession: it’s what draws us to Gill, whether we like it or not.” Survivors couldn't pray at the Stations of the Cross. They were done by a paedophile. The very hands that carved the stations were the hands that abused. Critical theory has a perspective on the argument. Post-structuralist literary critic Roland Barthes made a fatal separation between creator and work by announcing the 'death of the author' in 1967. And early 20th-century Russian critic Osip Brik famously opined that Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin would have existed even if Pushkin had never lived at all.But to Davey's step-daughter the issue is simple. The books are used with children, despite it being known that he used teaching - and by extension his books - to get close to his victims. However, since then it appears to have quietly reconsidered: without making any public announcement, it has for most of 2022 removed all trace of Gill, his work remaining in storage. From January to May, the museum was given over wholly to a show featuring the more wholesome local figure of Dame Vera Lynn. As for bringing poets persecuted for their sexuality into the debate - sorry, how is this in any way relevant? Homosexual poets from ages gone by were persecuted due to the ignorance of the time - I pray that there will never be a time when sexually abusing defenceless children is deemed acceptable. Comparing the two situations is a huge insult to all non heterosexuals accross the world is it not? Meanwhile, even as the deadline for putting the exhibition together approaches, Hepburn continues to consider precisely what else will appear. The problem is that he would like to include some more explicit images of pairs of ecstatic lovers in which the men depicted have erections. “They show happy, sensual, consensual relationships, and to exclude them would, I think, skew the visitor’s understanding of Gill. But this is about understanding our legal position. To include them might mean we have to put some kind of age requirement in place, and we would prefer not to have one. An age requirement would imply that all of the content is inappropriate for children to see, and that isn’t the case at all. These are some of the most remarkable drawings and engravings in British art.” His hope is that these pictures can be shown in a separate, screened-off area, and that the rest of the show can therefore be open to allcomers. 'Museums have a duty to talk about difficult issues,' says the curator. 'They are a place where society can think' a b "Eric Gill archival and book collection". University of Waterloo Library . Retrieved 18 May 2016.