Eric Craven Gregory, also known as Peter Gregory (6 October 1887 – 9 February 1959), was a publisher and benefactor of modern art and artists.
He was chairman of art publishers Percy Lund, Humphries & Co. Ltd. and of the Ganymed Press. From 1949 he was a director of The Burlington Magazine. He was a governor of St Martin’s School of Art (from 1948), Chelsea School of Art (from 1950), and the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court.Obituary, The Times, 11 February 1959; Who’s Who 1959, A. & C. Black, London.
Birth and family Gregory was born on 6 October 1887 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the eighth and youngest son of Yorkshire parents.
His father, James Gregory, had been a powerful Congregationalist preacher in Leeds before succeeding William Lindsay Alexander at Edinburgh’s Augustine Church (1879) and serving as Chairman of the Congregational Union of Scotland (1890).Congregational Year Book, 1914; The Scotsman, 29 November 1912.
His mother, Martha, was a daughter of Joseph Craven, worsted manufacturer and Member of Parliament (MP) for Shipley. The couple returned to Yorkshire in 1896 and James Gregory, having retired from the ministry, was elected a Bradford city councillor and became chairman of the council’s Higher Education Sub-Committee and president of the local branch of the Workers’ Educational Association. Martha’s brother-in-law, William Priestley, was an MP for the city.Bradford Weekly Telegraph, 29 November 1912; Leeds Times, 30 May 1874; Shipley & Saltaire Times, 21 April 1883; Leeds Mercury, 30 March 1932, 24 August 1935.
Professional career and war service Following education at Bradford Grammar School (where he won the Debating Society’s Cup),Bradford Daily Telegraph, 28 May 1906. Gregory joined and soon occupied a managerial position at Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., printers and publishers based in Bradford with offices on London’s Amen Corner. He became joint managing director of the firm in 1930 and was chairman from 1945. Lund Humphries possessed particular expertise in graphic reproduction, published The Penrose Annual and, during the period of Gregory’s employment, became one of the most accomplished printers of illustrated art and design books. Lucy Myers, "Creating Henry Moore: the Story of the First Lund Humphries Artist Monograph", 2020, lundhumphries.com. Accessed 29 December 2022.Marian Williams, "A measure of leaven: the early Gregory Fellowships at the University of Leeds", Artists and Patrons in Post-War Britain, ed. Margaret Garlake, Courtauld Institute of Art (2017).
The sophistication of its technical resources was evidenced in 1941 when the firm assisted development of a component for the gaseous diffusion plant associated with manufacture of Britain’s atomic bomb.Yorkshire Post, 22 August 1945.
Gregory's service with Lund Humphries was twice interrupted by wartime duties. He was commissioned in the Bradford Rifles in 1914, saw action in France, and was wounded by cross-fire during the second battle of Bullecourt in May 1917.London Gazette, 2 October 1914; Leeds Mercury, 15 May 1917; entry for Capt. Eric Gregory, 2/6th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment in Bullecourt 1917: Breaching the Hindenburg Line (Paul Kendall, The History Press, 2010). In the 1920s he commanded one of the West Yorkshire territorial companiesLondon Gazette, 11 April 1921. and wrote the official account of his unit’s wartime operations (during which one-third of its number perished).E. C. Gregory, History of the 6th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, Volume II, Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., 1923.
In World War II he was attached to the Ministry of Information and, from 1942, he was Secretary of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee.Yorkshire Post, 23 July 1943; Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939-1945, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 188.
Involvement with the arts Gregory had a deep regard for all forms of artistic expression. This feeling was doubtless fed by the increasing importance of design in the business of Lund Humphries, but it was also rooted in Gregory’s own family background. The painter and sculptor Ernest Sichel was among his cousins, and his elder brother, Edward Gregory (1880–1955), was a talented amateur artist whose work was regularly shown at the Bradford Art Society’s Spring Exhibitions.Yorkshire Post, 2 October 1908, 4 March 1911, 6 March 1924; Leeds Mercury, 2 March 1909; Bradford Weekly Telegraph, 7 March 1913. In the 1920s Gregory began collecting drawings, prints, paintings and sculpture; initially his taste seems to have been relatively conventional, but quite quickly he developed what was then a rare appreciation for contemporary British art.
Ernest Sichel was close to William Rothenstein and his brothers Albert and Charles Rutherston,Michael Jacobs and Malcolm Warner, The Phaidon Companion to Art and Artists in the British Isles, Phaidon Press, 1980, NH6-7. In 1932 John Rothenstein, son of William and soon to become Director of the Tate, considered Sichel to be "in the foremost rank of living English artists": "Ernest Sichel: A Neglected Master", Yorkshire Evening Post, 21 November 1932. and Gregory mixed with their Bradford circle.Gregory later partnered Jeanette Rutherston in mixed doubles tennis competition: Shipley Times and Express, 21 July 1928. Charles Rutherston was not an artist but a passionate admirer of art and patron of artists who assembled what, according to Lawrence Haward, "art-lovers in this country have long recognised to be the very best private collection of modern English art in the country". In 1925 Rutherston donated the collection to Manchester City Gallery because he felt it selfish to keep it to himself.Charles Rutherston & The Rutherston Loan Collection, 2018, at https://www.magnetmanchester.org/charlesrutherston/2018/11/26/charles-rutherston-amp-the-rutherston-loan-collection. Rutherston’s focus and philosophy were to be mirrored in Gregory’s own collecting habits, though he lacked the fortune Rutherston had made in business.
In 1923 Rutherston introduced Gregory to Henry Moore and there began a lifelong friendship between the two men. Gregory became an important patron of Moore, buying his work at a time when, as Moore later recalled, "I was an unknown sculptor and there were very few, less than half a dozen, collectors of modern sculpture in this country... The debt that I owe him is enormous".Henry Moore, The Times, 19 February 1959 (reprinted as Moore’s introductory text to Leeds City Art Gallery’s 1960 Gregory Memorial Exhibition).
Among Gregory’s other early enthusiasms were the paintings of Matthew Smith and Vivian Pitchforth, and in the 1930s and 1940s his purchases and practical support promoted the careers of artists who were yet to establish themselves, including Ben Nicholson, Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick, Reg Butler, Victor Pasmore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland and others of whom, said Jane Drew, "the list is endless".Jane Drew, The Times, 11 February 1959.
Eager that work he appreciated should reach a wider audience, he donated examples to galleries, supported public exhibitions, and promoted publication in photographic form. In 1933 he shared the cost of a Sheffield exhibition of work by contemporary Yorkshire artists. In the following year he extended the credit that enabled Anton Zwemmer to publish the first book on Henry Moore, and in 1938 he was instrumental in arranging a showing at Leeds of Picasso’s preparatory sketches for Guernica.Leeds Mercury, 22 July 1933, 6 December 1938; Myers, "Creating Henry Moore". In 1933, having relocated Lund Humphries’ London office to 12 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, Gregory opened a small exhibition gallery in the basement, used by Man Ray as the venue for his only London exhibition and subsequently as his studio.
In 1939 Lund Humphries’ publication of Frank Lloyd Wright’s An Organic Architecture established the firm as a leader in the cause of modernism, confirmed in 1944 by its lavishly illustrated Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings. Production of the latter was considered to be a commercially daring investment in the work of a single living artist, but its success led to publication of what became a catalogue raisonné of Moore’s work (six volumes on his sculpture and seven on his drawings). It was also followed by the firm’s launch of a series of similar monographs on Paul Nash, Nicolson, Hepworth and Naum Gabo.Myers, "Creating Henry Moore". Eric Humphries, Gregory’s joint managing director at Lund Humphries, was aware of the need for innovation in the field of design. Speaking to pupils at Bradford College of Art in 1945, he declared that future industrial development rested in the hands of the designer and the scientist, and that the designer would play an increasingly important part in national life as the public demanded new and better designs: Yorkshire Post, 20 March 1945.
In 1946 he presented thirty-two pictures (including six Pitchforths) to Manchester City Gallery,Manchester Evening News, 16 May 1946. His donations to the gallery had begun in 1929 when he presented examples of the work of Raymond Coxon and Edna Ginesi: MAG accessions details at artuk.org. and in the following year, together with Peter Watson, Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, he founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) to provide a London centre for experimental work in art, music, film and drama. He was honorary treasurer of ICA until his death, serving on its management committee and assisting with its financing.Nottingham Journal, 4 July 1947; Yorkshire Post, 13 December 1950.
In the 1950s Gregory was honorary secretary of the Contemporary Art Society and made purchases in support of the Society’s objective of placing contemporary pictures in public collections. He was always a generous lender of items from his own collection: in 1941 five of his Moores were on loan to Temple Newsam; in 1943 numerous of his paintings hung at the International Youth Centre in Pont Street; in 1953 Wakefield City Art Gallery had from him a Modigliani drawing, two Georges Braque oils, a Picasso engraving, an André Derain landscape, a Nicholson, one of Moore’s "shelter drawings", and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s Paris.Yorkshire Post, 13 August 1943, 7 March 1953.
The Gregory Fellowships In 1943 Leeds University accepted Gregory’s offer to fund a number of fellowships in the creative arts. Fellows were to become members of the University’s staff for a defined number of years and to continue their creative work while in residence, discussing and explaining it to other members of staff and students. Fellowships were to be up to four in number and held in literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture and, on occasion, music. Gregory insisted one fellowship should always be held by a poet because he believed "poetry interprets life in its finest aspect".
The objective of the fellowship scheme, as defined by Gregory, was to bring younger artists into close touch with the youth of the country so that they might influence it while also allowing artists to keep in touch with the needs of the community. He sensed that the provincial universities were remote from the mainstream of national culture, particularly the creative arts which were mostly centred in and around London, and he wanted in some measure to remedy this. "The scheme", observed the Yorkshire Post, "will prove of practical value – a point that will appeal to many Yorkshiremen".Yorkshire Post, 22 and 23 July 1943. Arrangements for award and management of the fellowships were supervised by a committee that included Gregory, Henry Moore, Herbert Read, T. S. Eliot and Bonamy Dobrée, and the first fellows took up residence in 1950.Yorkshire Post, 18 May 1950; Dave Roberts, "The Gregory Fellowships in the Creative Arts", 21 September 2011, Leeds Art Gallery Online (http://www.leedsartgallery.co.uk/review/listings/l0002.php ).