The letter R in any of Gill’s types is unmistakeably his own: the tail springs from the relatively small upper bowl with a dynamic curve and then, straightening, continues at an angle to the base line below, which it meets with a flat terminal, sometimes enlivened (as in Perpetua and Joanna) with a hint at a serif.
In 1930 Beatrice Warde picked out the R as one of the letters which adds a ‘personality of its own’ to Gill Sans, adding that it ‘would be recognised by anyone who had watched this letter develop out of Gill’s straight-tailed R’. A study of Gill’s lettering shows that this form of r did not so much develop as happen rather abruptly in about 1907.

Gill had begun to use a ‘straight-tailed R’ when he submitted to the discipline of the calligraphic teaching of Edward Johnston.

This R, with its tail springing from the main stem, was shown by Johnston in his Writing and illuminating and lettering (1906) as the ‘essential form’.

In the chapter on lettercutting that Gill contributed to Johnston’s book he shows the same shape adapted for cutting in stone. In his essay he suggested that ‘beauty of form may safely be left to a right use of the chisel combined with a well-advised study of the best examples of inscriptions: such as that on the Trajan Column and other Roman inscriptions in the South Kensington and British Museums.’

In an inscription that Gill cut in 1907 to the memory of Irene Nichols several of the letters depart from his current style. The bracketing of the serifs extends so far up the stems of the thin strokes that these are almost wedge-shaped. E is a curved uncial form. G is curly. M has a high centre, and R has a curved tail springing from the bowl. None of these shapes is sanctioned by Johnson, although he was to make use of the M in his Underground letter, and none resembles the letters of the Trajan column nor any other lettering of Imperial Rome. However all of them are present, sometimes as alternative forms, in an inscription, not however a Roman one, that is indeed in the South Kensington (now the Victoria & Albert) Museum, which acquired it in 1887.
Spinetta inscr – whole inscr and detail

The monument to the Marchese Spinetta Malaspina, dating from the second quarter of the fifteenth century, is from a church in Verona. The wedge-shaped strokes of the inscription. the high centre to M and the ‘sprung’ tail to the small-bowled R are all characteristic of Italian, and especially Florentine, work of this period, and the resemblance to Gill’s Nichols inscription of 1907 is striking.
Gill was not the only British designer to have felt the appeal of this style of letter, whose influence can be seen in work by William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Gill’s mature letter forms are powerfully stamped with his own character, but they are a fusion of material from many sources. However he discovered it, in the Florentine R he had found a form that would serve him for the rest of his life.

Note

This text appeared in the Monotype Recorder, new series, no. 8 (Autumn 1990), pp. 38-9. Most of this issue of the journal consisted of other essays, leaving only two pages at the end for the words and images of what I called a ‘tailpiece’. That meant its wording had to be short, which is probably no bad thing in a blog, so I have left the original words more or less untouched. But I thought it might be useful to add a few more words and images by way of amplification.

Irene Nichols (1862–1907) was for a time a bookbinder. She travelled in Russia and Poland, and then for a time in Italy. She learned bookbinding in Rome, and when she returned to England she took lessons privately from T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at his own workshop, but she never joined the Doves Bindery, and after the death of her mother in 1892 (did she perhaps inherit an income?) she largely gave up binding for ‘social work’. Her health became worse and she died in her forties from influenza. So much we know from Marianne Tidcombe’s researches, and from a brief memoir published in her memory. Was her own evidently close association with Italy in any way connected with Gill’s exploration for an idiom that was new in his own lettering? There seems to be no way of discovering, but as we can see, one of its effects on his own work was enduring.

images – Joanna drawing
image – Spinetta R

As for the effect of the ‘Florentine’ style on ideas about lettering, which would continue in typography with types like the Della Robbia of the American Type Founders Company, I imagine this to be a natural effect of the widespread study during the later 19th century of the Florentine sculpture with which the inscriptions are associated. In the cast court of the South Kensington Museum there were casts of the Donatello Judith and Holofernes from the Piazza della Signoria, with his signature in a mature littera antiqua (for some reason it has just been moved next to the fragment of the façade of the late 16th-century house of Sir Paul Pindar in the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries), and of the Cantoria, the singing gallery of Luca della Robbia (1431–8), intended for the cathedral, which is exhibited in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Its painted inscription is carefully reproduced on the museum’s cast.
Morris weathercock
When I mentioned the influence of the Florentine letter on William Morris, which might seem – given his lack of enthusiasm for some Italian models – one of the more surprising places to find it, and a very early example of its use too, I was thinking of his design dated 1859 for the pierced copper weathercock at the Red House at Bexley, where it can still be seen. This is his drawing for it, now in the RIBA library, showing his initals and those of Janey intertwined, and bearing the date in a fascinating and extraordinary set of numerals.

It might be added that the high centre to M which is found not only in Gill Sans but which had appeared in Edward Johnston’s Underground letter, a wholly non-Imperial form which echoes Florentine inscriptions, does some damage to his claim to have based his capitals on Roman classical forms.

The essay by Beatrice Warde / Paul Beaujon that I cited in my original text was ‘Eric Gill, sculptor of letters’, in the Fleuron 7 (1930), pp. 27–60.