11. The Founder of the Charming Arts and Crafts Movement Was a Total Perv
Celebrated English sculptor, printmaker, and type face designer Eric Gill (1882 – 1940) created many of the fonts that are still in use today, and was named Royal Designer for Industry – Britain’s highest award for designers. He also played a leading role in the charming and cozy Arts and Crafts Movement that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which popularized the use of folk styles of decoration.
On the other hand, he was also a total pervert – a man of many contrasts, to say the least. He converted to Catholicism in 1913, and like many newcomers to a religion, he became a zealot, loudly and ostentatiously professing devoutness to his new faith. He founded a lay Catholic religious order with his wife and others, called The Guild of Saint Joseph and Saint Dominic, and went around wearing habits, with a chastity girdle beneath. The chastity girdle was merely aspirational, seeing as how it did not stop Gill from being a complete creep.
He had an obsession with sex, working it into almost anything. And his obsessions did not revolve around normal sex: he was into bestiality, incest, and pedophilia, was addicted to prostitutes, and abused his maids. One of Gill’s most famous sculptures, Ecstasy, depicts a couple passionately entwined. The model was his own sister – with whom he had a lifelong incestuous relationship – and her husband. Some of his most celebrated artwork used as models his own prepubescent daughters, whom he liked to draw nude in semi erotic poses.
Gill’s diary described his perversions in exhaustive detail: extramarital affairs, decades of sex with his sisters, incest with two of his daughters, plus bestiality with his dog. In short, Britain’s most celebrated sculptor, founder of a charming art movement, and one of the greatest artists of the modern era was the kind of person who would probably be behind bars or on a sex offender registry if he was alive today.