Before the Kardashians, there was the Gibson Girl

SALISBURY — It would be difficult to pick a universally acknowledged standard for female beauty in today’s United States, what with twerkers and tattoos all competing for the shrinking American attention span.

But illustrator Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Girl” fit the bill for the better part of two decades, from 1898 to the end of World War I.

Tom Hayes explained the rise in public esteem of the Gibson Girl in a talk at Salisbury Town Hall on Saturday, Jan. 9. (The talk was sponsored by the Salisbury Association Historical Society and the Scoville Memorial Library.)

The Gibson Girl represented the new wealth of the Gilded Age and predated Hollywood.

She was also a wholly imaginary celebrity — although clearly modeled after Gibson’s wife, the irrepressible Irene Langhorne, the daughter of Virginia railroad and tobacco baron Chiswell Langhorne.

Gibson was born in Roxbury, Mass., in 1867. In 1875, the family moved to Flushing, N.Y. Gibson’s father was in the habit of illustrating his letters, and young Gibson showed early talent.

Gibson’s professional career began in 1886, when he sold a drawing to Life magazine for $4.

“Pen and ink was his forte,” said Hayes. Printing technology had progressed to the point where pen-and-ink drawings could be quickly and efficiently reproduced, and magazines proliferated.

Gibson was very successful, “drawing anything or anybody” for a wide variety of publications, including Scribner’s, the Century and Harper’s. He provided illustrations for books, too. 

And he prospered, earning the equivalent of $100,000 in 2015 dollars — enough to maintain a studio in New York City and to finance a trip to Paris to study painting.

In the late 1880s Life magazine featured a gently satirical series from Gibson, called “Delicious Moments,” for which Gibson also wrote the captions.

By the 1890s, his style had changed, becoming less dense and dark. Hayes said it was because Gibson learned to use his shoulders and elbows, creating long strokes.

The public responded positively, and Gibson tripled his income.

At age 26, he was sitting pretty — except for one thing.

Enter Irene Langhorne.

Gibson met her at Delmonico’s restaurant in 1894. Hayes said she was a true Southern belle, with legions of discarded beaus in her wake.

Gibson, on the other hand, was “shy, modest and humble.”

The Langhorne family was intimidating, too. Irene had four sisters, all considered beautiful. (One of them became the first female Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom.)

Hayes said the Langhorne girls had all been “groomed by their parents for wealth and society,” although the effort was not always successful.

The couple married in Richmond in 1895, and Irene “became Dana’s muse as an artist.”

Gibson had created a predecessor to the Gibson Girl, called the American Girl.

“The American Girl was cold,” Hayes said, speculating that the artist’s status as shy, diffident bachelor meant he wasn’t very familiar with the ways of young women.

But as Gibson’s “admiration, devotion and love” for Irene developed, “for the first time he began to draw with feeling.”

Gibson never publicly acknowledged the influence of Irene on the Gibson Girl, Hayes said.

He also “saw no need to make her perfect — because Irene wasn’t perfect.”

The Gibson Girl was an enormous commercial success. Her image adorned pillows, wallpaper, inspired songs, and a Gibson girl series was featured on a set of dinner plates.

The Gibsons had two children and a home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In 1905, Gibson decided to drop illustration and went to Europe to study painting.

In 1907, calamity ensued when Gibson lost most of his money in a stock market crash, forcing him to start over as an illustrator.

In 1918, Life magazine’s art editor, John Ames Mitchell, died, and Gibson took over. He eventually became the owner of the magazine.

He wasn’t much of a businessman, Hayes said, only taking the job because he felt he should.

“He was a victim of his own sense of duty and responsibility.”

And in the meantime the Gibson Girl (and the Gilded Age) succumbed to the Flapper and the Jazz Age.

Irene Gibson became active in Democratic party politics, supporting first Al Smith and then Franklin Roosevelt.

And in 1931 Gibson resigned as president of Life, which was bought by Henry Luce and developed into the picture magazine people think of today.

He died in 1944, on 700 Acre Island on the Maine coast.

Irene returned to western Virginia, and died in 1956, impressive to the end.