'An endless curiosity about sex' is how Eric Gill's daughter Petra described her father – a phrase that captures the extent of his appetite without naming what we now know it extended to. She only offered it long after Gill's death, and after his rigorous biographer Fiona MacCarthy had chosen to tell the world what the sexual codes in his meticulously-kept diaries revealed.

Sculptor, typeface designer, stonecutter and printmaker, intimately associated with the arts and crafts movement, Gill expounded firm views on contemplative religion, artistic integrity and personal freedom – principles his own conduct routinely violated. He married when he was just 22, and lived with his wife Ethel (after her conversion to Catholicism known as Mary), three daughters and adopted son in a succession of artistic communities in which the studio, the Catholic chapel and the bedroom all played an essential role.

His diaries describe his sexual activity in great detail, including extramarital affairs, sexual abuse of his two eldest daughters beginning in their early teens, incestuous relationships with his sisters, and sexual acts with his dog – aspects of his life little known until the publication of MacCarthy's biography. The same appetite that filled the diaries also shaped the work: his interest in sex, procreation and the life force was ever-present in his art; his nude sculptures had real genitals; his nude prints had real pubic hair.

Eric Gill's life and work are well-documented, especially by MacCarthy in her unflinching biography (Eric Gill, Faber, 1989) and by Malcolm Yorke (Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit, Constable, 1981). He was a formidable sculptor and graphic designer, and his typefaces are still in everyday use. His skills, though, were as a designer rather than as an artist; when working in two dimensions on paper his medium was the clean line rather than subtle shading and colour. He had the ability to suggest skin forms and contours with two or three lines, and even though his proportions were sometimes exaggerated and stylised, his naked human bodies are entirely believable. For anyone who has read the diaries, it is precisely this immediacy that carries complications that cannot easily be set aside.

Similar artists

Aubrey Beardsley – British decadent illustrator whom Gill himself cited as a formative influence.
Marcus Behmer – German jugendstil illustrator of decadent and erotic literary subjects.
John Buckland Wright – British engraver of classical erotic subjects for fine-press editions.
Michel Fingesten – Austrian-Italian etcher of refined erotic-fetishistic subjects.
Willi Geiger – German printmaker of refined erotic subjects.
Duncan Grant – British Bloomsbury painter of male homoerotic subjects.
Mark Severin – Belgian-British engraver of classical-erotic subjects in modernist style.