London, as seen by Charles Dana Gibson

An advertisement for Charles Scribner's Sons promoting Gibson's oblong-folio book London at five dollars, billed as 'The Holiday Book of the Season.' Six figures fill the frame: two elaborately dressed women—one in a wedding veil and crown, one in Elizabethan ruff—move through a file of Tower of London Yeoman Warders (Beefeaters) bearing halberds and partizans. A bearded male courtier figure accompanies them. The Beefeaters are rendered with exaggerated, bulbous, red-nosed faces characteristic of Gibson's comic grotesque idiom—English working-class physiognomy played broadly against the aristocratic elegance of his trademark women. The composition flatters the ladies while gently mocking ceremonial Britain as pompous and comic, a pointed transatlantic joke aimed at American readers eager to feel sophisticated about the Old World.