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).
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.
[5][6] 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.
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.
[12] 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.
[16] 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".
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.
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.
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.
[23] 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.
He left the residue of his estate to the Society of Authors to fund the making of Eric Gregory Awards for the support and encouragement of young poets who are British subjects.
From it the Tate elected to take as gifts Louis Marcoussis’s Interior with a Double Bass, Moore’s Figure and Half-Figure, Hans Arp’s Constellation According to the Laws of Chance, Jean Dubuffet’s Man with a Hod, and Vieira da Silva’s Paris.
The lots included twenty-one examples of work by members of the St Ives School (7 Nicholsons, 7 Hepworths, 5 Frosts, an Alfred Wallis and a Wilhelmina Barns-Graham), and paintings by Gillian Ayres, Sandra Blow and William Scott.