Maps of the mind

MacDonald ‘Max’ Gill (1884–1947) is less well known than his notorious brother, Eric. But was he less of a designer, less of an artist?

The son of a Brighton clergyman, his career was built on a sequence of remarkable connections. The architect Halsey Ricardo, a descendant of the economist, was his tutor. While working for church builders Nicholson and Corlette, Gill very likely met Edwin Lutyens at the Art Workers’ Guild.

And for Nashdom, the neo-Georgian house Lutyens built in 1909 for Prince Dolgorouki at Burnham in Buckinghamshire, Gill drew an imaginative ‘Wind Map’. Somewhere between illustration and cartography, this was a pointer of what was soon to come from his pen and brush.

In 1913 Frank Pick, the publicity manager of the Underground Electric Railway Company of London, commissioned Gill to cheer up the Tube, then depressed by competition from the new motor buses. The result was Gill’s 1914 ‘Wonderground’, a fully mature realisation of the hybrid caricature maps he made his own.