Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
The son of a London stockbroker, Gill joined the Madras Native Infantry at the age of twenty and was to spend most of his life in India. An excellent draughtsman, Gill was entrusted with the duty of making drawings of the architectural and Pictorial remains in the Caves of Adjunta [Ajanta] starting in 1844, according to his military service record, and this type of assignment would later inform his photographic work. In twelve years of highly dedicated labor, Major Gill, although hobbled by illness and impeded by strife in the region, produced a fine series of documentary paintings. Tragically, many of them were destroyed in a fire at the Crystal Palace in London in 1866; the few survivors are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Gill became a photographer in the mid-1850s and was a corresponding member of the Photographic Society of Bombay. Although his initial work was in collodion, he exhibited a series of calotype views before the society in 1856. The competition was stiff, but, as the society’s journal pronounced in the same year, Gill had the most on view, and all, without exception, perfect, the society said, calling it very evident that he not only understands the details of photographic manipulation, but evinces very high artistic skill. For one important set of views, Gill had written in the journal the previous year, he could think of no plan other than anchoring a Balloon whence to operate in front of the cave, when it happens to be on the side of a steep hill (the society opined that perhaps he could try an extra wide-angle achromatic lens). Gill battled the government over payment and delays but finally completed his work on the Ajanta paintings in 1863. He was buried in India, his spirit living on in his son, who became an important traveler.