After being
demobilized Gerrard studied at the
Manchester School of Art in 1919 and at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1920 where
Henry Tonks was his teacher and contemporaries included
Samuel Rabinovitch. In 1925, Tonks appointed Gerrard head of the school's sculpture department, a position he held until 1948 after which he was Professor of Sculpture until 1968 and then
emeritus professor. In the 1920s, Gerrard elected to wear a standard set of clothes –
sports jacket, corduroy trousers, a collarless shirt and a yellow
stock. He bought multiple copies of these items and wore them regularly for decades. , 1933 During the Second World War, Gerrard was a
Staff Captain attached to the
Royal Engineers working on
camouflage projects. Following a plane crash in which he was badly injured, he almost had an arm amputated, but persuaded his doctors to save it so that he could continue sculpting. In a long teaching career, Gerrard taught and influenced numerous artists, among them
Kenneth Armitage,
Karin Jonzen,
Eduardo Paolozzi and
F. E. McWilliam. In the austerity years after the Second World War, Gerrard kept the school supplied with raw materials for sculpting by salvaging stone, wood and metal from bomb sites. Well respected for his expertise as a teacher and his generosity, many of his former students would visit him at his home in Kent where he continued sculpting into his eighties. Whilst teaching at the Slade, Gerrard received private sculpture commissions, often executed on a large scale in stone, as well as producing murals for ocean liners. He also worked as a book illustrator with his future wife
Katherine Leigh-Pemberton, producing wood cuts for
Elephants and Ethnologists (by
Grafton Elliot Smith) and
Egyptian Mummies (by Smith and
Warren Royal Dawson) in 1924 and for the
Book of Bath in 1925. During 1944–45 he worked as a
war artist. Among his sculptural works are: •
Memorial Stone for a Hunter, 1926. Displayed temporarily at the
Tate Gallery before its final installation. •
North Wind, 1928–29. One of eight personifications of the
four winds commissioned by
Charles Holden and
Frank Pick for the headquarters of the
Underground Electric Railways Company of London at
55 Broadway. •
St Anselm, 1933, St Anselm's church,
Kennington Cross. •
Monumental Parcel, gilded carved wooden panels of horses in a forest for
RMS Britannic. •
Stages in the Development of Man, 1955, four wall panels built into the end façade of a building in
Hemel Hempstead. •
The Dance, 1960, a sculpture wall for which he was awarded the
Royal British Society of Sculptors' Silver medal. An exhibition of his work was staged at the South London Art Gallery in 1978. Collections that contain work by Gerrard include the Tate Gallery, and the
Imperial War Museum. The
Henry Moore Institute archive contains works by Gerrard and his papers. ==Family==