How Good Is Man’s Life The Mere Living by Ralph Beyer

Ralph Beyer (1921-2008) was commissioned to make this piece in the late 1980s by Jill and John Langford, who chose the text from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Saul’. The Langfords were family friends of the Beyers and lived in Nottinghamshire. Jill Langford later donated it to the Lettering Arts Trust, and it was displayed for a while outside the gallery at Snape, Suffolk, before coming to Grimsthorpe, a mere forty miles from its original home.

Ralph was a pupil of Eric Gill and an influential letter carver. In the early 1960s, his lettering for the new Coventry Cathedral broke with the formality of most inscriptional work of the time.

On loan from the family of Jill and John Langford.