Background
Colin Gill was born at Bexley Heath in Kent.
Colin Gill was born at Bexley Heath in Kent.
He studied at the Slade School of Art and in 1913 became the first recipient of the Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting to the British School in Rome.
At the start of, Gill joined the Royal Garrison Artillery and served with them on the Western Front as a Second Lieutenant with the 17th Heavy Battery until 1916 when he was seconded to the Royal Engineers to work as a front-line camouflage officer He was invalided back to England, with gas poisoning, in March 1918 and spent several months recovering at the Hospital for Officers on the Isle of Wight. In May 1918 he offered his services as a war artist but initially was turned down and continued to work as a camouflage instructor.
After the British War Memorials Committee did commission Gill to produce a large work for the proposed, but never built Hall of Remembrance, he was released from his duties at the Camouflage School and returned to France on 7 November 1918 to do sketches, and other work, for his BWMC commission.
He stayed in France until 14 December 1918, visiting Mons only hours after it had been retaken by the Allies. At the Front, Gill spent a week stationed in an artillery battery where he suffered from frost-bite.
The visit to France resulted in the paintings Evening, After a Push and Heavy Artillery, the painting intended for the Hall of Remembrance and, later, Canadian Observation Post for the Canadian War Memorials scheme. In Heavy Artillery Gill draws on his experience as a camouflage officer;- the two large howitzers in the painting both have a patchwork camouflage design and are covered in green netting to avoid detection by enemy aircraft.
By 1919 Gill had returned to the British School in Rome.
Gill also showed works at the Royal Academy from 1924 onwards and taught painting at the Royal College of Art from 1922 until 1925. Between 1925 and 1927, Gill worked on a large mural, King Alfred"s long-ships defeat the Danes, 877, for Saint Stephen"s Hall in the Palace of Westminster. This was followed by mural commissions for the Bank of England, Essex County Hall in Chelmsford and Northampton Guildhall.
In the early thirties he had an affair with Mabel Lethbridge, a Great War heroine and writer, while occupying a studio on the first floor of her Chelsea home.
In 1939 Gill received a commission to paint murals at the Johannesburg Magistrates" Courts and it was in South Africa, in November 1940, that Gill died of an illness.
Gill exhibited with New English Art Club for the first time in 1914 and eventually became a member of the group in 1926.
