The Gibson Girl and Her America

The Best Drawings of Charles Dana Gibson

Charles Dana Gibson

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486135670
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

At the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Dana Gibson's pen-and-ink drawings of the `American Girl` — now remembered as the Gibson Girl — became the national ideal of femininity. This collection of his images of youthful, dynamic women offers an informative and amusing reflection of the era's social life. Sentimental, humorous, and often gently satirical, these images portray the Gibson Girl at the theater, in the drawing room, flirting and courting, vacationing at the beach, and engaging in other genteel pursuits. Several of Gibson's `common man` illustrations provide a contrast, along with a section devoted to one of the artist's best-known and most beloved characters, the curmudgeonly Mr. Pipp.
This gallery features more than a hundred carefully selected images from vintage editions. A rich source of royalty-free art, it offers graphic artists, fashion designers, social historians, and nostalgia lovers a lovely and accurate chronicle of a bygone era.

CHARLES DANA GIBSON

DELINEATOR OF AN AGE

Henry C. Pitz

THE effect of an artist upon his contemporaries is usually a subterranean and elusive thing, seldom plain to all eyes. And seldom does such a force touch more than a fraction of its potential audience. When it reaches up and down through social layers and commands imitation, when it influences the habits, demeanor and external appearance of large numbers and leaves its imprint on two decades of bustling life, it acquires the nature of a pictorial marvel. It becomes an important page in social history, a revealing portrait of an age, a fascinating treasury of mass psychology. And that all this should come out of an ink bottle!

Behind the ink bottle was a man, of course—a dedicated, hard-working artist of conspicuous talent who in his younger days could never have suspected the power hidden in a dashing pen technique. No one could have been more astonished than Charles Dana Gibson himself to witness his art in the process of shaping life, to watch a large portion of the American populace trying to conform to the people in his pictures.

Mimicry on a national scale is not a new feature in American life. The strong persuasions exerted today by the motion picture, theater and television were once wielded by the illustrator. But such widespread power over a period of about two decades can seldom be traced back to a single personality. Gibson became America’s conspicuous example of an artist intuitively absorbing the yearnings of his time and crystallizing them into captivating pictorial images. There was a time when his pictures were known in practically every home in the land. The latest copies of the comic magazine Life were opened first to the Gibson pages. The large horizontal Gibson albums, packed with his pictures, were on countless parlor tables, and on the walls were large-size reproductions of his most beloved subjects. Gibson reproductions crept from the printed page onto all kinds of likely and unlikely surfaces: china plates and saucers, tiles, souvenir spoons, tablecloths, pillow covers, chair covers, ashtrays, matchboxes, screens, fans and umbrella stands. A pet hobby of the time, pyrography, encouraged thousands to scorch Gib...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• CHARLES DANA GIBSON - DELINEATOR OF AN AGE