6. There’s Pervy, and Then There’s This Sculptor’s Level of Pervy
Eric Gill was obsessed with making love and liked to work it into all his work. His obsessions did not revolve around normal intercourse: he was into incest, bestiality, and pedophilia, was addicted to prostitutes and liked to abuse his maids. One of his most famous sculptures, Ecstasy, depicts a couple passionately entwined. The model was his sister, with whom he had a lifelong incestuous relationship, and her husband. Some of his most celebrated artwork used his own prepubescent daughters as models.
Gill liked to draw his daughters nude, in semi-erotic poses. In his diary, he described his perversions with great relish and in exhaustive detail. Extramarital affairs, decades of intercourse with his sisters, incest with two of his daughters, and bestiality with his dog, he penned it all. In short, Britain’s most celebrated sculptor and one of her greatest artists of the modern era was the kind of person who would probably be in jail or on an offender registry if he was alive today. That makes modern appreciation of his artistic talents pretty awkward, to say the least.