GIBSON Charles Dana (Illustrator)

Before television and movies, Gibson identified an essential character as deftly and as unforgettably as any novelist. His "Gibson Girl" was the personification of America's modern woman. Probably seen wearing the fashionable shirtwaist (a masculine-styled blouse of the early twentieth century), her S-curve figure and loosely constructed mound of hair gave shape to the new woman. Her face varied slightly, but she was the icon of twentieth-century fashion embodied in an active in such Gibson books on the middle and upper-middle classes as The Education of Mr Pipp (1899), The Americans (1900) and The Social Ladder (1902). Gibson had studied at the Art Students' League in New York and worked for late nineteenth-century magazines that required illustrations for news and stories, but ultimately he invented his own story of the fashionable, independent woman of the twentieth century.

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