Studio: international art (8.1896)

Charles Dana Gibson

American household of refinement. But she is,
or rather she has gradually become, only one part,
somewhat subsidiary, in his remarkable cartoons.

That girl is unique. For years the American
reporter has been identifying her with various
prototypes in the flesh. Society beauties have
more than once been singled out as the original
girl. But America must needs be democratic,
and the latest discovery of Mr. Gibson's model
points to the "dresser" of the serpentine dancer,
Loie Fuller. Like Trilby, she is a hybrid, her
father having been a Frenchman and her mother a
Cuban; and the details of her career have been
flooding every American newspaper for months.
Need it be said, however, that the discovery is no
discovery at all ? Mr. Gibson's girl has no one
prototype. She is the daughter of the artist's
imagination, unique, copyright beyond the reach
of all law : a child of art, pure and simple.

This girl then—and to the lay mind she bounces
into being as soon as Mr. Gibson's name is men-
tioned—while far from being the sole product of
his genius, is the mainspring of his art, the inspirer
of his humour. She has always been queenly, a
daughter of the gods divinely tall, deserving to
be included in any future version of A Dream of
Fair Women. She is everywhere in the forefront, a
grand dame, carrying herself with the stateliness of
a duchess, and yet with all the buoyancy of youth
—the product of an advanced, and at the same
time comparatively new, civilisation. But in Mr.
Gibson's hands she is never a mere fashion-plate.
She is a Galatea come to life. He has frankly

affirmed that he has little appreciation for technique,
however clever, which is divorced from the human.
The modus operandi which he uses in every indi-
vidual cartoon is absolutely characteristic of the
evolution of his humour. He begins by drawing a
figure in some vital attitude. Having done so, he
lays it aside in his sketch-book. If the figure is
really alive, it will contain elements of some human
situation, humorous, suggestive, satirical or senti-
mental, as the case may be, and thus, round this
figure his picture grows. If, on the contrary, the
figure or the situation suggests nothing alive he
throws it to one side. For any purpose of his it is
as dead as Queen Anne.

As you look on a Gibson girl, you feel that she
has a mind or a heart, that she thinks and feels ;
that she is an influence for good or for evil—but
always a factor that has to be reckoned with. In
short, Mr. Gibson is not so much a Du Maurier
as a Thomas Hardy ; he is in art what the author
of " Tess" is in letters. To both of them, the
woman is the old, old Eve. She is not an Ameri-
can girl. She is not English. She is the universal
girl—as viewed under the aspects of an advanced
civilisation.

" The woman did it" ; that, in essence, is the
main philosophy of Mr. Gibson's art so far, just as it
is the idea pervading Mr. Hardy's romances. Like
the historian of Wessex, he is old-fashioned enough
to believe that the master passion is as potent as
it was in the times of Romeo and Juliet. One
says old-fashioned, because this is not the popular
belief. The fiction that has been served up for