"There Were 'Fans' in Those Days"

Charles Dana Gibson's pen-and-ink plate illustrates a moment of mid-19th-century sporting euphoria as recalled by memoirist James D'Wolf Lovett. A middle-aged man in a frock coat and bow tie flings both arms skyward—top hat brandished in one hand, fist pumped with the other—his legs wide in a triumphant stride. The caption, "There Were 'Fans' in Those Days," frames the image as affectionate retrospect: Lovett's text describes a celebrated bare-handed catch whose fame pursued him for forty years. Gibson's line work is loose and kinetic, the figure almost vaudevillian. No ethnic caricature is present. The plate's argument is gentle nostalgia for antebellum Boston sporting culture, when crowd passion was spontaneous and amateur rather than commercially organized.