• U.S.

Art: Frankly Romantic

3 minute read
TIME

Her faintly haughty, uptilted face and alabaster gaze were framed between a velvet choker and a brave upswept chignon. Her manner and her clothes were proud, yet just a shade on the bold side. She was seen everywhere—at fashionable parties and on bathing beaches, in books and magazines, especially Life, and in hundreds of thousands of real-life copies. She was the Glamor Girl of the Gay Nineties, the unforgettable Gibson Girl.

She was born on the drawing board of a young New Englander, Charles Dana Gibson, and she made her creator the most influential illustrator of his day. He once explained how it happened: “I was young and healthy, and the one thing that’s worth drawing when you’re young and healthy is a woman. You can’t spend all day with fruit and flowers.”

Charles Dana Gibson never lost his “young and healthy” interest—even in the last months before his death, which came of myocarditis last week, at his Manhattan home.

Pen-&-lnk Duets. “C. D. Gibson” sold his first drawing to Life (for $4) when he was 19. It showed a small dog looking at a big moon, over the caption “The Moon and I.” If he had not been a fast, hard worker, he could not have satisfied the quick public demand for his pretty women and his quietly satirical drawings of society life. By the time he was 25, he was the most sought-after black-&-white artist in the U.S. His fattest contract came in 1893, when Collier’s agreed to pay $100,000 for 100 drawings.

His wife, who often posed for his drawings, has been generally credited with being the real Gibson Girl. The artist first saw her at Delmonico’s, arranged to meet her at tea the next day, and married her a year later. She was Irene Langhorne, a Virginia beauty, sister of Lady Astor-to-be.

Charles Dana Gibson’s great appeal, as man and artist, was frankly romantic. The towering, blue-eyed illustrator was a notable lady’s man. His drawings mainly concerned the trials & tribulations of love between incredibly handsome, well-bred young people (the man in his duets often resembled Gibson’s close friend, dashing, strong-chinned Richard Harding Davis).

Oils and Oysters. In the 1930s, affable, active Charles Dana Gibson turned to oil painting—summers, at his island home off the Maine coast; winters at his Manhattan studio, where he worked from 9 to 4. He seldom showed and never cared for these later works.

Shortly before he died, in his 78th year, the artist summed up the major interest of his working years. Said he: “If I had been an oyster, I’d have drawn girl oysters. Wherever I looked I saw those beautiful girls, and who was I to resist?”

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