(1867-1944)
Created the "Gibson Girl"

The Gibson Girl was, at once, a series of illustrations, a "look", an influence on fashion and publications for 20 years.

She was the Victorian "glamour girl".

So who or what was the Gibson Girl?

"She was taller than the other women currently seen in the pages of magazines ... infinitely more spirited and independent, yet altogether feminine.

She appeared in a stiff shirtwaist, her soft hair piled into a chignon, topped by a big plumed hat. Her flowing skirt was hiked up in back with just a hint of a bustle.

She was poised and patrician. Though always well bred, there often lurked a flash of mischief in her eyes."

As described best by Susan E. Meyer, in her book America's Great Illustrators.

Charles Dana Gibson was an acclaimed artist in oils, writer, and master artist in black and white drawing where he was known for his skillful, somewhat satirical portrayals of society life.

He is best known for capturing the spirit of an era in his drawings which appeared in many publications, including Life magazine. The original inspiration for the Gibson girl was apparently the Paris-originated mannish, tailored suits for women of the late 1800s. Variations of the mode, with long flaring skirts, shirtwaist bodices, close-fitting sleeves, and high necks, persisted until about 1910.

The Gibson Girls flash of mischief was not lost upon readers. It was a characteristic they loved, that seemed to exemplify the American spirit of resourcefulness, adventurousness, and liberation from European traditions.

The "inventor" of this elegant, willowy image of feminine beauty was born on September 14, 1867 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a descendant of sturdy, hard-working New England stock.

When Charles was of high school age, his parents scrimped and saved to send him to the Art Students League in Manhattan, a fine school boasting famous painters like Thomas Eakins and William Merrit Chase on the staff.

Charles' fellow students included the soon-to-be-acclaimed Western painter Frederic Remington.

Gibson studied for two years, before the financial hardship on his family made him decide to go to work so that he could pay his parents back for their generous support. Unfortunately, the skill that he had displayed as a silhouette artist was not evident, at first, in his pen-and-ink work. He made the rounds of all the magazines and publishers, both large and small - he had good business sense - with no success, until finally in the fall of 1886 he managed to sell, for four dollars, a small drawing of a dog chained to his doghouse, baying at the moon.

The purchaser of this work was Life magazine, at that time an influential humor publication edited by John Ames Mitchell, an artist himself.

Although he thought Charles' work was crude, he saw the "honesty and courage" in it, which led him to give Gibson guidance and then more work.

Gibson was nothing if not determined, and he parlayed his first sale (after celebrating his new professional status with a seventy-five cent chicken pie) into an ever-growing business.

Month to month his income increased steadily, and he found himself a studio.
He pored over English and American magazines for new techniques and ideas, and when, in 1889, he was earning enough money for a trip to England and Paris, he went there specifically to study.

He met his idol, the English artist George du Maurier, who did satiric drawings for Puck, and when he came back to America Gibson developed a new vitality in his style. Du Maurier was famous for his drawings of striking society women, and soon Gibson would be, too.

By 1890, the artist was working for all the major publications in New York:

Bazaar

plus doing his weekly drawings for Life.

Then, with the creation of the "Gibson Girl," as she came to be called, he became - in modern parlance- a superstar.
The Gibson Girl was, in the artist's own words, "The American Girl to all the world," even as she raised her new-fangled golf-club and cried "Fore!"

She was spunky and sentimental, down-to-earth and aristocratic at the same time. And she appeared in drawings that captured with bold craftsmanship such timeless themes as love, money, self-deception, and social climbing. One brilliant and moving series published in 1899 even shows the Gibson Girl from infancy to old age. Gibson's captions gave the drawings, with their masterly evocation of mood through light and shadow, the quality of short stories.

And indeed, in such series as "Mr. Pipp's Education," which was about a henpecked husband and his family traveling through Europe, Gibson created the visual equivalent of a novel.

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