Charles Dana Gibson's elegant drawings
captured the spirit of an age.

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 - for the next thirty years.