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Charles
Dana Gibson's elegant drawings
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:
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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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.
