7. A Pervy Artist
Eric Gill (1882 – 1940) was a celebrated English sculptor, printmaker, and typeface designer. Many of his fonts are still in use today. He played a prominent role in the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts Movement that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which popularized the use of folk styles of decoration. For his creative endeavors, Gill was named Royal Designer for Industry – Britain’s highest award for designers. A lesser-known but awkward fact about Gill – as in the extremely icky kind of awkward – is that he was a total creep.
Gill was a man of many contrasts, to say the least. In 1913, he converted to Catholicism. As with many newcomers to faith, he became a zealot, and loudly and ostentatiously professed devoutness to his new creed. With his wife and others, he founded a lay religious order called The Guild of Saint Joseph and Saint Dominic. He went about clad in a habit, with a girdle of chastity beneath. The chastity girdle was probably aspirational because it did not stop him from being a totally unchaste pervert.