Life — November 15, 1894 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

»- LIFE: THE GIBSON GIRL. OR a good many years the writer of this column has furnished articles to be set in type and used as frames around the drawings of C, D, Gibson. When he has con- structed a paragraph that filled his heart with joy and vanity, it has been his luck to open next week's LIFE and find that a Gibson Girl had put her dainty foot right through the middle of it. There has been no subject in contemporary literature upon which the present writer has attempted to shed light that the Gib- son Girl has not intruded some part of her anatomy or finery into it. She has done it very gracefully and with a ravishing smile; but even that won't smooth out the creases in a writer's vanity when he finds his choicest sen- tences cut in two bya picture. The great public seems to be in league with the editor and artist to keep up the massacre of pure literature in the interests of high art. At last a day of reckoning and revenge has arrived. Mine enemy has published a book—" Drawings by Charles Dana Gibson,” a handsome folio, printed on heavy paper, with attractive cover (R. H. Russell & Son, Publishers). The trouble with revenge for which one has waited a long time is that it isn't sweet. The edge is off the griev- ance, and one has endured it so long that it takes the guise of a blessing. So it happens that | have come to look upon the Gibson Girl as my friend. I am positive that she has broken up more stupid paragraphs than bright ones—for all of which I am duly thankful. Indeed, the Gibson Girl as she appears in this attractive volume of 84 drawings is a charmer to melt the heart of any crusty old bachelor. Even my friend, the cynical Adrian, says that sheis “no clothes horse.” She is dressed 4 /a mode to be sure, but she has a pair of shoulders under her coat that can drive an oar through the water or keep a hunter down to his work. And her neck the Ten Commandments, and reads LiFe every Tuesday. That is the Girl as I know her. She is probably different to you, At any rate you will find her somewhere in this volume. You can’t miss’ it; if you own this book you'll havea picture of your ideal girl. Some day you'll find her in real flesh and blood, and then you'll be glad to own her picture. For Gibson has a way of adopting all nice girls intohis family. You don’t realize what a large family he has until you get them all together in this book. There is a proud and haughty beauty among them that only a millionaire, with a superb education in addition to his bank account, would dare pro- pose to, And then there is a pleasant-faced, black-eyed fascinator, who would not mind living in a cheap house in the suburbs if she really loveda man. She would make the man believe that he owned a magnificent villa, and was the happiest fellow in New Jersey. Mr. Gibson has a great responsibility on his shoulders, and if he once fully realizes it, it will keep him awake nights. I wonder if he knows that there are thousands of American girls, from Oshkosh to Key West, who are trying to live up to the standard of his girls. You can always tell when a girl is tak~ ing the Gibson Cure by the way she fixes her hair. I've watched them go through the whole scale from Psyche knots, to Pompadour, to Bath Buns, to side waves with a bewitching part in the middle. Then, too, he has set a most adorable fashion in widows. I know sane, intelligent bachelors (who are not bald), who prefer the Gibson Widow to the Girl. The trouble with the Widow is that she is so transitory. You are dead certain that she is just waiting to be asked, and that you are the man to ask her. Now a real Art Critic would not tell you about the girls and the widows in Gibson's book, but would give you a lot of information about the wonderful technic, the simplicity rises out of her gown as though it were attached to something substantial. Then she looks square at you with intelligent eyes that hide a touch of mischief lurking in their corners. She is healthy and brave and independent and well-bred; she can dance as well as she can run a Boys’ Club, and she knows as much about golf as French and German, She goes to church on Sundays, recites comicbooks.com