Mrs. C.D. Gibson and Mrs. W. Astor & Son

A Bain press photograph rather than a Life cartoon plate, this image nonetheless illuminates the social world Charles Dana Gibson translated into ink. Labeled figures identify Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson—the former Irene Langhorne of Virginia, one of the celebrated Langhorne sisters—conversing with her sister Nancy Langhorne Astor, wife of Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount, and their son William Waldorf Astor (later 3rd Viscount, b. 1907). Two top-hatted men flank the women. The sisters embodied the transatlantic aristocracy Gibson simultaneously celebrated and gently satirized: American beauty and Southern charm absorbed into British peerage. Nancy would become, in 1919, the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons—a trajectory the Life readership of 1910 could not yet have imagined.