Studio: international art (8.1896)

Charles Dana Gibson

the young person during the last half a century has the " Never more " of Poe's tormentor ?—flying
put the old-fashioned idea of love out of court, homewards. Two solitary figures are the only sign
When Mr. Henry Arthur Jones ventured to of life on the landscape—a beautiful girl, seated on
resuscitate the old view, by entangling an ascetic the remnants of a wreck (how suggestive such a
clergyman in a woman's toils, the public was in- throne is !) grasping the stick, and robed in the
credulous and relegated " Michael and his Lost great-coat of the youth who lies entranced at her
Angel" to the great paradise of the played-out play, feet; watching them a forlorn dog, faithful to
And yet, this young American relies for his humour his mistress, and yet longing with melancholy eyes
mainly on this old-fashioned view of infatuation— to get home. " Is this a case for the S.P.C.A. ? "
and its consequences. For, in a civilisation like asks the artist.

that of America, the conflict of Nature with That is before marriage. Take any of the many
artificiality, of love against the purely financial after-marriage cartoons, and note how very grim

Mr. Gibson can be. Again, two
figures—on the left, a woman
hiding her head in her hands;
on the right, a man, stronger and
harder; in the middle between
them the figure of a dead Cupid.
A more elaborate scene works
out the same idea. It shows a
bored-looking man seated wearily
in his chair, longing to have a
quiet night at his fireside. On
one side is his wife, a woman of
fashion, ready to go out for the
evening. On the other side a
tall shapely figure of another
woman is shadowed, like Ham-
let's ghost, with her hand gently
laid on the man's sleeve. It is
no ghost. " It is only poor Jim
who happened to marry the
wrong girl, and sometimes when
she is particularly unendurable
he remembers the other one."
Much more grim is the story of
the widow, young and beautiful.
"a February dream" from a drawixg by c. dana gibson Cupid has fluttered into her life

(By permission of James Henderson, Esq.) again, but as she watches him

she hears the dull voice of the

marriage, is very acute, and, thus, Mr. Gibson family solicitor reading the terms of the will of the
has come to express what Mr. Hardy has finely late lamented, which forbids her to marry again
called " Life's Little Ironies "—ironies clustering for under the pains and penalties of becoming penni-
the most part round this central idea ; the natural less (see illustration, p. 76).

man or woman pitted against the man or woman Mr. Gibson has also a keen eye for the purely
who is struggling for position, or money, or luxury. pathetic. One of the best cartoons in the book
He pictures these ironies almost from the cradle shows a dinner-table. At the head of it stands an
to the grave, and, like Mr. Hardy, his satire old gentleman proposing a toast, a toast to the
has perceptibly become more grim, more biting, women he has known and loved, a shadowy crowd,
Take the very first cartoon in the collection that rise before his closed eyes, in old-fashioned
which Mr. Lane has issued in this country. Like coiffure and bygone bodices. The last picture of
all Mr. Gibson's work, it tells its own story. A all shows two figures, a man clasping a woman
title is redundant. A beach, lonely, desolate, passionately to his breast. You see it is all part
chilly; the birds— shall we say ravens, croaking of the same story, and one dwells on it because it
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