Mr. Grubbs Walks in His Sleep

Charles Dana Gibson turns domestic humiliation into a study in contrasts. Four elegantly dressed figures — two women in evening gowns, a seated man in black tie, and a standing male guest — play cards around a candlelit table in a richly appointed drawing room hung with Baroque-style paintings. At right, a disheveled figure in a rumpled nightgown and bare feet stares across the room: Mr. Grubbs, the unwitting host, sleepwalking into the very social world from which, the caption implies, he has always been excluded by his own wife. Gibson's pen-and-ink draftsmanship is precise and sardonic — the somnambulant husband rendered almost gaunt against the polished company. The joke cuts at bourgeois marriage, absentee husbands, and the wife who runs the household as her private social empire.