Mrs. C.D. Gibson

This is not a Life cartoon plate but a Bain News Service press photograph, included here as a portrait document. It shows Irene Langhorne Gibson (1873–1956), wife of Life cartoonist Charles Dana Gibson and the celebrated real-world model for his iconic 'Gibson Girl' archetype. She poses in a striped walking dress and broad hat outside what the background signage identifies as the New York Zoological Society's Administration Building. A uniformed attendant stands behind her, arms folded. The image carries no satirical caption; its interest is biographical—the living original of a pen-and-ink ideal, photographed in the same erect, self-possessed posture her husband made famous in American popular illustration.