The Gibson Girl and Her America: The Best Drawings of Charles Dana Gibson (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) by Charles Dana Gibson

Author:Charles Dana Gibson [Gibson, Charles Dana]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780486135670
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

FIG. 3: But how rapidly confidence and skill take command. Only two or three years later, the drawing of the two men at the table (Henry C. Pitz collection) shows the beginnings of authority. The figures are well drawn; the tones of dark clothing, white tablecloth and varnished chairs are well stated. Only a few years after this drawing, Gibson’s technique reaches the masterly level—the fourth stage—which is abundantly evident in the collection in this book.

Gibson created many appealing types, but towering above all were the “Gibson Girl” and the “Gibson Man,” particularly the former. These two types were a handsome, youthful pair, incredibly competent and assured. They could smile, but seldom laughed. They moved through a world that did not seem too demanding. Courteous, secure and serene, they had an Anglo-Saxon attractiveness which seemed to conquer all possible problems. They wore their fashionable clothes with unselfconsciousness distinction; their gestures were patrician. Yet they did not seem remote—not too remote. For a rapidly expanding middle class, busily climbing up the social ladder, here was a model of what they could hope to reach. A gifted artist, instinctively in tune with his time, was presenting the panorama of an American dream which he, too, believed in with all his heart.

The followers of that dream numbered millions. The younger women, in particular, tried to model their clothes, their gestures, their hair and features on the Gibson specifications. His pictures carried a message of hope, a tantalizing reach for a superior life. It was a dream that could not last, at least in that form. It was dissipated by the explosion of World War I.

Gibson threw all his pictorial energy into patriotic propaganda, but at the end of those four long years the world was a different place. His special world had vanished. His skill remained but he could not read the secrets of a disillusioned era. He continued to illustrate, then took on the burdens of editing Life, and in his later years retired to his island home in Penobscot Bay and painted—and painted well. But his touch with a vast audience was gone.

We can now see his pictures as part of our inheritance. They are honest pictures. The man himself is in them with his integrity, his lovable dignity and his warmhearted optimism. His time is in them, too. We can leaf through the pages of his albums and gain a more immediate understanding of that gilded age than could be derived from volumes of text.

HENRY C. PITZ

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