Charles Dana Gibson

This is not a cartoon plate but a photographic portrait of Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944), the illustrator whose pen-and-ink drawings for Life defined American ideals of femininity and class for a generation. Gibson sits in a Windsor chair, legs crossed, holding what appears to be a pair of eyeglasses, a drawing board visible at left — the props of a working artist caught between sittings. He wears the prosperous dark suit of the Edwardian professional. Gibson's Life work combined social comedy with aspirational portraiture; his 'Gibson Girl' — tall, self-possessed, faintly ironic — shaped how Americans imagined modern womanhood from the 1890s onward and made him the magazine's most commercially powerful contributor.