Alex Leith on Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein’s secret temple in the Downs.

An imaginary palimpsest

It’s an unseasonably hot morning in mid-March – my first day in shorts – and I’m standing at the top of Itford Hill looking down into the valley, to Beddingham and beyond. I’m attempting, with some difficulty, to locate the landfill site where I briefly worked as a young man. Back in the spring of 1983, after a period of fierce gales, I joined a team tasked with picking up litter blown over the fields surrounding the tip.

I didn’t know then what I know now: that these fields once formed the grounds of Asheham House (sometimes referred to as Asham House) home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Nor that shortly before the Woolfs rented the property, the site had been earmarked by Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein for a groundbreaking project: a ‘twentieth-century Stonehenge’ comprising a hundred or more highly sexualised sculptures and pillars, forming the temple for a ‘new religion’ they had devised.

Researching this unrealised scheme, I’ve been studying photographs of Asheham House by Roger Bamber, and paintings of the twin-gabled, Gothic-windowed building by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. But the house leaves no trace on the landscape, having been demolished in 1994 to make way for an extension of the landfill site. There isn’t even a sign of that unseemly dumping ground, discontinued in 2009 and subsequently rewilded. As I peer down into the valley, these features only exist as an imagined palimpsest. Or perhaps, considering my personal connection, a psychogeographical one. I’m not even sure where to look.

Gill and Epstein’s ‘secret temple’ never came to fruition, though a number of the sculptures and sketches they produced for it still survive. Indeed, the centre point of the scheme was Epstein’s colossal Sun God, carved from Hoptonwood stone, which, as I stand at the summit of Itford Hill, is temporarily on show in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. This will be a port of call in a few days’ time.

A sex object as surrogate

Let’s go back to 1909, and a landmark moment in British art. Eric Gill had recently escaped what he called the ‘trap’ of London and moved into a house in the centre of Ditchling, known as ‘Sopers’, with his wife Ethel and two young daughters. He still spent part of each week in the capital, but his life had shifted decisively.

At this point, Gill – a Brighton-born stonecutter with a growing reputation as a master of lettering – found himself in a period of enforced chastity during the late stages of Ethel’s third pregnancy. As an outlet for his frustrated desire, he decided to carve a naked female figure from a block of hard stone in his Ditchling workshop. It took him a week. While he thought the resulting sculpture to be ‘amateurish’, he thoroughly enjoyed the sexually cathartic process, a conception and birthing of sorts. ‘I was responsible for her very existence and her every form came out of my heart’, he recalled, in his autobiography. ‘A new world was opened up for me… a new alphabet – the world was made flesh… I was making a little revolution. I was rewriting what should have never been separated: the artist as a man of imagination and the artist as workman.’

And what he had done was revolutionary: Constantin Brâncuși had been practicing the lost art of ‘direct carving’ in Paris for several years, but for centuries very few British artists had attempted to create a figurative sculpture using this method. Most sculptors, Rodin and Maillol among them, worked via clay models, which were then translated into stone by craftsman assistants. Gill’s approach collapsed that division between conception and execution.

He called the sculpture ‘Estin Thalassa’ (Greek for ‘it is the sea’) and carted it to London to show his friend and patron Count Hans Kessler, who in turn showed it to Roger Fry. Their response surprised him. ‘To my innocent astonishment they took it extremely seriously’, he wrote, recalling how it was hailed ‘as a sort of baby angel announcing a new incarnation.’ The praise heartened his endeavour. ‘Instead of being shut up, as I might have been, and rather expected to be, and told to go home and not do it again, I went home very much ‘bucked’ and determined to do it again as often as possible.’ The craftsman had become an artist.

A scandalous commission

In the previous year, the 27-year-old New York sculptor Jacob Epstein, fresh from a period studying in Paris, had been hired by the architect Charles Holden to produce 18 eight-foot-high sculpted figures to adorn the façade of the British Medical Association on the Strand and Agar Street. Representing the different ages of man, they were the young American’s first public commission, and he toiled on the project for 14 months, creating clay models in the traditional manner.

Having moved to London in 1905 after an eye-opening visit to the British Museum, Epstein had absorbed influences from its Egyptian, African, and Polynesian collections. The figures he produced for Holden were raw, powerful, and often explicitly sexual, qualities that scandalised Edwardian sensibilities when they were unveiled in 1910.

Opposition was swift. The National Vigilance Association, based on the other side of the Strand, took particular exception, and the Evening Standard launched a campaign against the sculptures, condemning them as indecent, describing the work as ‘statuary which no careful father would want his daughter to see, or no discriminating young man his fiancée to see’. This controversy marked a key moment in the emergence of British Modernism, exposing a widening divide between progressive and conservative tastes.

Eric Gill was a vociferous supporter, suggesting Epstein’s work would ‘rescue sculpture from the grave to which ignorance and indifference had consigned it’. The two men, who moved in the same high-Bohemian circles – mutual supporters and patrons included Augustus John and William Rothenstein – quickly became firm friends.

They came from very different backgrounds, Gill the son of a Nonconformist parson raised in Brighton and Chichester, Epstein of Polish-Jewish immigrants, brought up in the ‘teeming’ multicultural streets of New York’s Lower East Side. But they shared important affinities: both were in their late twenties, both were highly sexually charged, and both shared a passion for breaking the boundaries of artistic convention. Similar themes obsessed the two artists: sexuality; fecundity; vitality. The scandal surrounding Epstein’s British Medical Association sculptures damaged his chances of attracting public commissions for some years to come, but resulted in him becoming Britain’s most famous sculptor, almost overnight. Nevertheless, he realised that he had a lot to learn from Gill, who was virtually unknown to the public at this point. Epstein was particularly interested in learning how to carve figures directly from stone. He abandoned his latest work in clay, a sculpture of Narcissus, and took to paying long visits to Sopers, where the two worked side by side on their direct carving, having joint-purchased 20 tons of Hoptonwood stone from a Derbyshire quarry.

A new religion, and a holy site

Gill, convinced that there was a spiritual dimension to their work, proposed the creation of a ‘new religion’ to undergird this artistic revolution. The friends started meeting in Augustus John’s Chelsea studio, to discuss its tenets. Their ideas drew on a mishmash of influences: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the only book by the German philosopher Gill had read), the Arts and Crafts movement, pagan sun worship, and the philosophy of the contemporary Indian thinker Ananda Coomaraswamy. Years later, John reported rather mockingly on these earnest encounters, suggesting that Gill’s vision was ‘in the form of a neo-Nietzschean cult of super humanity under the sign of Ithyphallus’, whereas Epstein’s ideas would be ‘realised by the apotheosis of himself on a colossal scale, alone, and blowing his own trumpet.’

Every religion needs a holy site, and Gill believed he had found one: a sheltered valley in the Downs, near Lewes, associated, perhaps apocryphally, with pagan sun worship. Six acres of land belonging to Asheham House, a building rumoured to be so haunted that no local farm labourer would set foot in the place. He took friends and patrons to see the chosen spot: Epstein, of course; Augustus John, and William Rothenstein, his loyal patron, who was expected to pay for the lease. In September 1910, Gill wrote to Rothenstein: ‘Epstein and I have got a great scheme of doing some colossal figures together (as a contribution to the world), a sort of twentieth century Stonehenge, and we have been looking out for a piece of land for the purpose.’ He mentions a secluded spot where ‘we should be free to do all we wanted without the fear of hurting anyone’s feelings or the risk of …our figures [getting] smashed up by some damned fools who didn’t choose to like them’.

Rothenstein was delighted with the idea, replying: ‘You are wonderful and I believe quite irresistible… You shall save a little corner for me, and you shall carve neatly on it – here lies one who loved more than he was loved – and Epstein shall carve [George Bernard] Shaw nude and you shall make [HG] Wells glitter in the sun.’ Augustus John wrote to Gill: ‘…the temple must be built. People will take to their heels at the sight of such a thing walking about in the daylight, but they will be overtaken with giant strides.’

Thus encouraged, the two sculptors got to work, in Gill’s Ditchling workshop. Epstein produced Sun God, an arms-raised figure often compared to the Long Man of Wilmington, Sun Goddess Crouching, Crucifixion: A Roland for an Oliver, and sketches for totemic pillars, depicting copulating couples. Gill carved a similar totem, now at Tate Britain and entitled ‘Ecstasy’ (though he is said to have referred to it as ‘Fucking’), and Cupid (aka Cocky Kid), a squat, well-hung child adorned with a gold-painted necklace. ‘When and where did you make the young sun god?’ wrote Rothenstein, of this piece. ‘He is wonderful – as witty as he is beautiful, as virile as he is short and tubby, and I love his bad temper’. Gill marked the bases of his sculptures with the symbol the friends had decided on to represent the ‘secret temple’ project: a hand with an eye in the palm, based on the ancient Middle Eastern Hamsa talisman.

A calamitous bust-up
In the autumn of 1910, according to Gill’s biographer Fiona MacCarthy, the two sculptors were virtually inseparable, meeting up almost daily, either midweek in London or at weekends in Ditchling, where Epstein and his wife Ethel spent Christmas that year. But, inevitably, perhaps, cracks began to appear in the friendship: ‘There were lingering disputes about tools, boots, work unfinished, charges for [Joseph] Cribb’s labour’.

And then there was Gladys. Gladys Gill was the second youngest of Eric’s six sisters, eight years his junior, who was a frequent model for his direct carving sculptures, visiting Sopers regularly with her husband Ernest Laughton. The couple were the subjects of Gill’s Ecstasy/Fucking relief sculpture, earmarked as one of the pillars at the Asheham House temple. MacCarthy writes that their ‘sitting’ for the work was a complicated business (it must have been difficult to keep their Kama Sutra-inspired position for hours on end) during which Gill’s apprentice Joseph Cribb was stationed at the door to guard against unwelcome visitors.

Matters were complicated even further by the fact that, writes MacCarthy, ‘at the time it was in progress Gill was embarking on an incestuous relationship with Gladys which lasted almost all his adult life’. If Gill’s diaries are to be believed, Epstein, too, was besotted by Gladys: one afternoon Gill reports discovering his friend chasing his sister around the kitchen table, brandishing a carving knife, with which, it seems, he had slashed her wrist, leaving a permanent scar. Or was he, in truth, trying to save her from trauma-response self-harm? Whatever the case, it seems Gill’s incestuousness was a step too far for Epstein. By the spring of 1911 their friendship was over, and with it their plans to create the Asheham temple.

In retrospect, the project’s collapse feels significant. The revelations contained in MacCarthy’s 1989 biography – detailing Gill’s incestuous relationships, the sexual abuse of his daughters, and other disturbing behaviour – have irrevocably complicated his legacy. It is difficult not to view the proposed temple through this lens: a monumental celebration of sexuality conceived by a man whose private life was profoundly troubling. You can’t help wondering how such a site would now sit within the Sussex landscape, had the project gone ahead. Feelings would certainly be hurt; figures smashed up.