Bachelor's Wall Paper

Charles Dana Gibson tiled his own celebrity creation—the Gibson Girl—into a repeating wallpaper pattern marketed, with wry irony, as Bachelor's Wall Paper. Dozens of identical oval faces crowd the sheet edge to edge: pale skin, heavy-lidded eyes, full lips, and the era's signature pompadour of voluminous upswept hair rendered in blue-grey ink against an off-white ground. The joke is sociological. The bachelor's walls are literally papered with the unattainable ideal woman—composed, cool, faintly superior—that Gibson had made the dominant female image of Gilded Age America. The design flatters and mocks simultaneously: the modern man surrounded by perfection he cannot possess. The Girls are uniformly the Anglo-Saxon patrician type Gibson consistently idealized.