Art: Forty Years After

A distinguished institution with the moldy patina of an old meerschaum pipe is the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Each year it selects one of its members for special glorification. Being thus glorified last week was one of the Academy’s most distinguished members, Charles Dana Gibson. On the walls of its uptown Manhattan headquarters hung the largest exhibition he has ever given, 162 drawings and paintings dating from an anti-Tammany cartoon of 1888 to a stack of flashily painted portrait sketches and landscapes done this summer at Dark Harbor, Maine.

Shortly after a group of Harvard Lampoon graduates had moved to New York and in 1883 founded a decorous humorous publication called Life, a Wall Street office boy arrived at their sanctum with a sketchy cartoon. He was the sort of office boy the editors of Life wanted to encourage-a hard working, impoverished Boston gentleman. The editors of Life gave Charles Dana Gibson $4 for his cartoon.

Further sales gave Gibson a chance to study first at the New York Art Student’s League, later in Paris. There he acquired the technique he still has, the loose draughtsmanship of the late great Anders Zorn. While in Munich, just before the Spanish-American War, Artist Gibson received a commission for some weekly pictures. A bald nervous little German came around looking for a job. From that followed a long series remembered by all Gibsonians as “The Education of Mr. Pipp.”

When Mr. Pipp acquired a daughter, a magnificent creature with a bust, a pompadour, and a Grecian profile (see cut), Charles Dana Gibson became world-famed. No U.S. illustrator has ever had such a vogue. Collier’s paid him $100,000 for a series of drawings. The Kaiser gave the Gibson Girl his official approval. There were songs about la fille Gibson on the Paris boulevards. A framed Gibson girl was as important to the U.S. undergraduate of 30 years ago as a bulldog pipe and a pearl-buttoned reefer.

Charles Dana Gibson, a huge man with a bald head, an eagle beak and a Gladstone collar, has admitted that his Gibson Girl was a composite picture of the three famed Langhorne sisters of Virginia. Sister Irene, Artist Gibson married. Sister Nancy married Lord Astor, now sits in the House of Commons. Sister Nora is the present Mrs. “Lefty” Flynn. The Gibson Man wearing the stiff straw hat and a high collar up to his bulbous chin was a fairly accurate portrait of Richard Harding Davis.

Two or three years ago it was the fashion to call Charles Dana Gibson the Peter Arno of the 1900’s. Few dare hazard a guess of what Artist Arno will be capable of at the age of 67.