Eric Gill

Eric Gill’s simple and graceful erotic drawings of nude female figures are among his most admired and most controversial works. His career as a designer and sculptor meshed with his leadership of a radical socialist Catholic art colony, the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, in the relatively isolated village of Ditchling in East Sussex, England. He routinely drew from nude models, usually his wife, daughters, and neighbors, as well as any female visitors to his house who would agree to pose. Gill may also have worked directly from pornographic photos, making it difficult to determine whether stylized drawings such as this were done from these sources, from life, or by retracing and refining a favorite pose among his own earlier drawings.