MacDonald “Max” Gill: A Debt to Edwin Lutyens

By Caroline Walker, Gill’s great-niece and biographer

MacDonald Gill (1884-1947), known to friends and family as “Max”, was an architect, letterer, graphic artist and mural-painter but achieved renown as a decorative map-maker. This influential but overlooked artist painted maps which were sought after by eminent individuals, such as David Lloyd George, while his eye-catching posters entertained the public on city streets and London Underground platforms. But this success might never have come about without Edwin Lutyens.

Brighton-born Max – a younger brother of sculptor Eric Gill, with whom he sometimes collaborated – trained as an architect in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. In 1903, he moved to London to work with church architects Charles Nicholson and Hubert Corlette. He also took classes with the calligrapher Edward Johnston, who became a good friend, at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and, by 1908, had set up his own practice, taking commissions for lettering and mural-painting.

Max and Lutyens were both members of the Art Workers’ Guild and first met there. The two were kindred spirits, sharing a whimsical sense of humour and love of punning. In 1909, Lutyens asked 24-year-old Max to paint a wind-indicator map on a wood panel for Nashdom, a palatial villa in Buckinghamshire. It was Max’s first map commission.

By 1913, he had painted three more wind-indicators for Lutyens, including a magnificent one for Lindisfarne Castle. And there were smaller jobs, too – foundation stones for St Jude’s Church in Hampstead Garden Suburb (carved by Eric), a sundial for The Salutation in Kent and a large stone inscription for Lambay Castle. Max’s diaries indicate correspondence and meeting dates and a ledger records jobs, client names and payments, but unfortunately no letters from Lutyens have survived.

Another key patron for Max was Frank Pick, Publicity Manager of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London – and later Chief Executive of London Underground – who commissioned him to create his first pictorial map poster. Unveiled in 1914, his “The Wonderground Map of London Town” – with its multitude of jokes – “makes people miss their trains yet go on laughing”, reported The Daily Sketch. This remarkable poster propelled Max into the public eye and would lead, in the interwar years, to a stream of requests to undertake commercial artworks, including maps for publicity campaigns for such firms as Shell-Mex and Rolls-Royce.

During the First World War, newly-weds Max and his wife Muriel lived in Dorset where he was architect-in-residence on a model-farm project, which exempted him from military service. However, from 1918, on joining the Imperial War Graves Commission Headstone Committee, he made an enduring contribution to the war effort by designing both the alphabet and regimental badges for military headstones.

After the War, the Gills moved to Chichester with their two children. Inevitably, there was a surge in demand for commemorative work; notable examples by Max include memorials for three Oxford University colleges, Barings Bank, 17 Queen Anne’s Gate (Lutyens’s office) and the Lutyens-designed Norwich Roll of Honour, for which Lutyens paid him the substantial sum of £400. The memorial for 17 Queen Anne’s Gate named employees of Lutyens’s office who fought in the First World War.

In the 1920s, Max was at the height of his creative powers, designing everything from book illustrations to country cottages. His most celebrated map of the time was his traffic-stopping poster “Highways of Empire”, designed for the Empire Marketing Board. He also produced painted maps and a dazzling chancel mural for St Andrew’s Church in Roker, Sunderland. He undertook numerous small jobs for Lutyens too, including coats of arms and a tiny watercolour for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House as well as decorative features for the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, including the imposing Royal Coat of Arms above the thrones and the Royal Cyphers – or monograms – embossed on the leather upholstery of the thrones.

Although the Great Depression brought a downturn in Max’s fortunes, he remained busy. One of his best-known works was the 7m-wide “Map of the North Atlantic” for Cunard liner RMS Queen Mary. He was assisted on this by Edward Johnston’s youngest daughter, Priscilla, who later became his second wife.

During the Second World War, he produced two acclaimed posters – “Tea Revives the World” and “The Time & Tide Map of the Atlantic Charter”, the latter commemorating the peacetime aims drawn up by Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt in 1941. Max’s last job for Lutyens was to paint the drawings of Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral in 1942.

After peace was restored, Max was asked to paint a map for the RMS Queen Elizabeth. It was his last major work: shortly after its completion in August, 1946, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died on 14 January, 1947.

Caroline Walker’s biography of MacDonald “Max” Gill, MacDonald Gill: Charting a Life, is available from all major bookshops and online retailers or via www.unicornpublishing.org for a special price of £20 plus p&p (just enter code LUTYENS at the checkout; offer valid until 31 December, 2020). You can find more information about him at www.macdonaldgill.com.