Eric Gill: A Retrospect

Extract

Eric had an engagingly boyish, at times almost infantile, sense of humour. He delighted in a stock of comic stories which he retailed with inexhaustible relish both for their formal nearness and for their garnered wisdom. Among these was a dialogue between three men in a railway-carriage:—

First man: ‘What lights are those?’

Second man: ‘They’re the lights of Hanwell.’

First man: ‘How strange they look!’

Third man: ‘Not half so strange as the lights of the train look from Hanwell!’

Perhaps this unassuming little allegory may enlighten the chequered history of the Money-changers from its thwarted beginnings in 1916 to its recent and painful aftermath in 1949.

rA representation of the turning-out of the money-changers has been chosen for a war memorial, for it commemorates the most just of all wars—the war of Justice against Cupidity—a war raged by Christ Himself.’

The sculptor had long dreamed of a great monument which should embody this struggle and at the same time be his crowning achievement. The original design—for a bronze group in the round—done in 1916 for a competition as a monument for L.C.C. employees, was rejected. It may be seen reproduced in Eric Gill published by Ernest Benn in 1927; it is also extant in a wood engraving. The upsurging rhythm of this bronze group is finer than the more geometrical movement of the relief ultimately carved in stone at Leeds.