The Gibson Girl and Her America

The Best Drawings of Charles Dana Gibson

The Gibson Girl and Her America

Compiled by Henry C. Pitz (Dover)
ISBN: 0-486-21986-0

There is obviously something in the human psyche that needs visual art. In our modern world we’re bombarded with graphic images from an increasing number of sources until practically numb but still we respond to a certain cartoon, a piece of wall or tee-shirt art, or a poster, and it becomes for a time ubiquitous and inescapable.

This is not a new phenomenon, and from the earliest days of reprography images and designs and the people who made them have started fads and fashions, often becoming rich and famous in the process.

Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) was a master with ink and pen, as well as a brilliant observer of the modes of his time. His commercial illustration career began in 1886 when he sold his first illustration to a new general interest publication entitled Life Magazine. Gradually his abilities and commissions grew until by 1888 he was a household name amongst the emerging literate middle-class of America. From then on he stopped observing fashion and society as his drawings increasingly dictated it.

His depictions of young women became the way women should look, his sly knowing snipes at relationships became the way young couples should act, and his trenchant digs at the pastimes of the nouveau riche became a guidebook to fashionable manners and mores. No artist in history has had the influence and power that this mild and quiet craftsman unwittingly wielded. The ‘Gibson Girl’ became the aspirational paradigm of a generation of young women and men, who either wanted to be one or wed one.

For twenty years he ruled the graphic consciousness of America until World War I destroyed that cosy world. During the conflict he turned his considerable skill to patriotic themes but once the shooting was over a different society felt little affinity to the genteel, demure and polite subjects Gibson represented. After a period as editor of Life he retired to a life of painting and contemplation.

Not just for his skill and talent, but also the uncanny ability to be a pictorial zeitgeist, Charles Dana Gibson is one of the most influential artists in the last 500 years. His style of rendering instantly equates to a certain time and place and mind-set. He is an artist every comic fan owes an unpayable debt to, even though he never drew a single comic strip in his entire career.

© 1969 by Dover Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.