Self Portrait 1927

This is Eric Gill’s self-portrait in pen and ink. Gill was a British artist active in the first half of the twentieth century. This self-portrait is fascinating because of the hat Gill wears. It’s a square cap. We can associate it with traditional scholarly dress, but it also seems to reference the hats worn by stone masons, linking Gill with the medieval guilds of stoneworkers. Gill was deeply religious and his work often engages with debates about art and religion. He was interested in re-establishing craft traditions and his visual language can be seen as an attempt to challenge modern industrial forms of art production. By consulting Gill’s diaries and letters, alongside writings about the history of art education, we can shed further light on the social role of art in early twentieth-century Britain. We can also examine how the Arts and Crafts movement attempted to reform artistic institutions.