What is striking is that once the immediate commotion over Gill's sexual aberrations had died down, there was a new surge of interest in his work. The 1992 retrospective at the Barbican finally demolished the patronising view of Gill as a Catholic sculptor, setting him in the mainstream of modern British art. The monumental architectural carvings made in Gill's Pigotts period in the 1930s, such familiar elements in the London street scene that they were in danger of being overlooked, emerged with a new clarity. Prospero and Ariel outside the BBC building in Portland Place; the large-scale East Wind sculpture that hovers over St James's Underground station: these are weirdly wonderful examples of Gill's work.

The striking thing about Gill's work, whether carving, letter-cutting or typography, is his mastery of linear expression. As a young art student, he knew the cathedral in intimate detail, affected most of all by Chichester's remarkable pair of early Norman stone panels carved in relief with biblical scenes. Gill, his emotions always close to the surface, could not look at these carvings without tears. Their influence is obvious on his own characteristically two dimensional carvings: the Westminster Stations; the Creation of Adam panels on the League of Nation's building in Geneva. The strange, ecstatic flatness of such famous wood engravings as Divine Lovers also originated here. But Sheehan says it's possible to make a distinction between the quality of a piece of science and the ethics of how it was obtained. This might apply to Davey's work.On an overcast Wednesday afternoon in January 2022, a 54-year-old man ascended a ladder at Broadcasting House in central London to the ledge where Eric Gill’s 1932 statue of Prospero and Arial from Shakespeare’s The Tempest stands. As a companion guarded the ladder, filming events on his phone, the protester chiseled the foot of the statue and daubed graffiti on the 10-foot figure: ‘BBC PAEDOS + PROPAGANDA’; ‘TIME TO GO WAS 1989’; ‘NOOSE ALL PAEDOS’. It took about four hours for the Metropolitan Police and the London Fire Brigade to bring the protester to safety before detaining him. The discovery of Gill's precise and candid records in his diaries of his various sexual adventures and experiments was the sort of coup any biographer would long for and yet in some way dread. I knew that it could alter fundamentally perceptions of Gill, both as man of God and as artist. Impossible to view without a frisson, those delicate, delicious portraits of the teenage Petra. Having read Gill's own account of his experimental sexual connections with his dog in a later craft community at Pigotts near High Wycombe, his woodcut The Hound of St Dominic develops some distinctly disconcerting features. The knowing affects the viewing. How can it not? But Gill is too good an artist, too ferocious and intrepid a controversialist, to be protected and glossed over. We need to see him whole.

Arthur Eric Rowton Gill ARA RDI (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Gill as "the greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter-cutter and type designer of genius", he is also a figure of considerable controversy following the revelations of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters and of his pet dog. Survivors couldn't pray at the Stations of the Cross. They were done by a paedophile. The very hands that carved the stations were the hands that abused. Maybe these works of art should be taken down and stored away until such a time as the people who have been abused or hurt by these artists have long since passed away. Artwork done by similar artists of the past does not bother us now because there is no-one it can offend as they have long since gone. But far and beyond his artistry Gill was a paedophile who abused his daughters, their maid, had sex with his sisters and even his dog, Gill would be in prison today.I think there is no need to destroy any genius' work? I agree that it may be disturbing for the victims yet how can one destroy a masterpiece for personal reasons? Secondly, I think an artist¿s personal and professional life should never be mixed up.