Charles Dana Gibson studied at the Art Students’ League in New York in 1884 and 1885. The following year, Life Magazine published his first drawing. Between 1890 and 1920, his drawings appeared in Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century Magazine, Pall Mall, McClure’s, The Graphic, and more.
Gibson “has gone into the fashionable thoroughfares and byways,” said the paper. “He visited the clubs and the theaters, the music halls and law courts, and described in vivid pictures and prose what he has seen there. He has walked the parks and given us types and scenes met with in London’s lungs.”
Gibson followed that up with a series of articles in McClure’s Magazine in 1899 that detailed his travels in Egypt. He illustrated many articles, including Robert Grant’s The Art of Living and A. C. Goodloe’s Stories of College Life. He wrote and illustrated an article on Love and Life in 1897. Another series of illustrations for Scribner’s depicted a New York Day—Morning, Evening, and Night.
In his day, art journals referred to Gibson as a society artist, covering the lives of upper-crust Americans and London’s city dwellers.
Gibson’s Girls represented the new woman. They were independent, college educated, challenging the norms of Victorian society. His girls wore pants and took part in sports rather than sitting on the sideline watching. A Gibson Girl painted, played tennis, golfed, played the violin and piano, and yet, through it all, she was well-dressed and stylish. An illustration of a scrub woman gives one the impression she could drop the broom and transform into the belle of the ball.
Society and women were changing, and Gibson documented those changes with pen and ink sketches. Women modeled themselves after his drawings. Men oohed and awed, learning the new rules of dating and society from how Gibson portrayed them.
The only question was whether women were changing, or C. D. Gibson’s illustrations nudged them into making those changes.
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