"And the fool, he called her his lady fair" / C.D. Gibson (1917)

Gibson draws a well-dressed man in evening clothes bending attentively over a bed whose occupant is rendered as a skeletal crone—sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, jeweled headdress, cigarette trailing smoke—surrounded by medicine bottles and wilted flowers. The title, a sardonic quotation from romantic verse, supplies the bitter punchline: the man is blind to what the viewer sees plainly. The composition belongs to Gibson's wartime vein of moral allegory rather than his earlier society-page wit. The skeleton figure echoes a long European danse macabre tradition, here turned against male vanity and self-deception—the "fool" courts dissolution itself. Gibson's satirical target is class pretension and erotic delusion among affluent white society, his customary subject.