Portrait of Gill's Son in Law The Day After His Death
Portait of David Pepler.
Sept 3, 1934.
Price: $9,500.00
About the item
Pencil portrait, signed "Eric G" lower right, identified and dated lower left. 14 x 10 inches, matted. Mounted and framed. Some overall toning. Short closed tear underneath matting, which is taped to verso of work.
Item #375751
David Pepler (1905-1934) was Eric Gill's son-in-law, who married his daughter Betty in 1927, also the son of his partner in the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, Hilary Pepler (1878-1951). Pepler died only a couple of weeks after Gill's return from his transformative trip to Jerusalem, and he rode with the body from the hospital in London back to Pigotts. After the mass and requiem, Gill spent the morning drawing David's portrait, a process he described in his memoirs:
"When the husband of our eldest daughter died, she asked me to draw his portrait as he lay in our chapel. For several hours I stood close beside his body looking closely into his face and trying to transcribe his features accurately. That was a revealing experience — before my eyes death took him further from the living world. Even as I watched, the bony structure of his face became more sharp and hard; the flesh contracted on his brows and nose and chin. The nobility and patience of his character became more emphatically visible. It was, as it were, a race between corruption and revelation. On the one hand his spiritual form became more visible as its fleshly shape became more attenuate — on the other the disintegration which death of the body precisely is became more and more woefully and nauseatingly imminent. I was not horrified, I was not even astonished; but it was difficult, thinking of the lips she had kissed, to keep back my tears." (Gill, Autobiography, pp. 237).
