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Troubled Abstraction:Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier Jennifer A. Greenhill
Blinded by the radiant glow of the Gibson Girl, ‘another moth’ falls prey to her
luminous charms (plate 1). With one arm shielding his eyes and the other outstretched,
a gentleman in evening dress drags himself toward this magnetizing female presence.
The American illustrator, Charles Dana Gibson, explored such scenarios of mystical
female power again and again in the images he produced for journals like Life, and
the folios that brought them together in sumptuous large scale.1 Indeed, like so many
other late nineteenth-century artists who concocted related visions of idealized
femininity, Gibson insists on his girl’s special position as a beacon of aesthetic power.
Her ‘mission’, as the artist explained it in an interview published in the New York Times in 1910, was not only to make men weak at the knees, but was also, and
fundamentally, to point American culture toward a racially evolved future. Invoking
a Darwinian rhetoric of natural selection, Gibson described the American girl who
had inspired his work for almost thirty years as a fi gure in process, en route to
‘eventual’ perfection. She would achieve this state by combining, he said, the ‘best
points of all those many races which have helped to make our population’. And yet
Gibson’s work rarely acknowledges the heterogeneity he takes to be so benefi cial.2
Beauty would only, it seems, truly register for Gibson if it were fundamentally white:
the ‘best part of [the American girl’s] beauty’, he maintained, ‘will and has come
from the nation of our origin – Great Britain’.3
While revealing the social and cultural exclusivity of his construction, this assertion
also draws attention to its relation to the ‘high-bred English girl’ of the illustrator
George Du Maurier.4 Robert W. Chambers confi rmed in 1905 that ‘one naturally recalls
Du Maurier’, when thinking of Gibson. In Du Maurier’s ‘social pictorial satire’ (as the
artist termed it), which appeared in Punch from the 1860s until the mid-1890s, as well
as the three novels he published late in his career – Peter Ibbetson (1891), Trilby (1894),
and The Martian (published posthumously in 1897) – Du Maurier trademarked an ideal
visual type that inspired Gibson’s own confections.5 Contemporary critics often noted
the resemblance by stressing that Gibson’s girl was the superior specimen – she was
more fl exible, more versatile, more explicitly modern.6 This verdict is surely owed to
the greater range of situations Gibson explored; as New Woman, his girl rode a bicycle
and could evade suitors with marvellous athleticism.7 She was, in other ways, too, a
fi gure in motion. As Martha Banta has argued, the Gibson Girl was ‘fl exible enough
to mutate absolutes, alter essences, and catch change within continuity’.8 She thus
encapsulated the modern by seeming to open up the fi xed contour, by existing as a kind
of proposition in the process of formulation.
Detail from Charles Dana Gibson, ‘The Weaker Sex. II’, c. 1903 (plate 15).
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00844.xArt History | ISSN 0141-679034 | 4 | September 2011 | pages 732-753
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Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
1 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘Another Moth’, in The Social Ladder, Drawings by Charles Dana Gibson, New York and London, 1902. Photo: Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.
Taking a cue from Banta, this essay explores how Gibson’s one-upmanship
over Du Maurier is enacted at the level of line and, critically, the accentuation of
the blank, unmarked page (plate 2). Gibson’s programme of social advancement is
formulated through an aesthetic that put him fi rmly in the avant-garde, a reputation
that depended on his original treatment of the white page as a crucial element of his
minimalist designs. What is the social signifi cance of such stylistic and compositional
choices? If whiteness was critical to Gibson’s understanding of evolutionary
superiority, that complex of ideas was central in turn to the strategies of his black-
and-white imagery. As we shall see, Gibson would use whiteness, as an abstract value,
to distance himself from Du Maurier, to set himself apart as the ostensibly more
advanced, more evolved artist.
By focusing on the semiotic value of whiteness in Gibson’s art, my argument
extends the efforts of scholars to investigate the ways in which that rather imprecise
racial category visually signifi es. Building on the work of critical race theorists
who have for the past twenty years complicated the ‘unraced norm’ of whiteness,
art historians such as Angela Rosenthal and Martin Berger have demonstrated
how a ‘racialized perspective’ informs eighteenth-century portraiture, Civil War
era photography, architectural projects and much else.9 The great contribution of
this work is its attention to the social implications of seemingly unremarkable or
ostensibly incidental stylistic or iconographic choices.10 Typically white fi gures
within black-and-white illustration are delineated through an absence of line work,
as for example in Edward Kemble’s illustration to Marietta Holley’s Samantha among the Colored Folks (1894; plate 3). However, as I will argue, the whiteness of black-and-white
illustration is racialized in more elusive ways, even when it is dislocated, or partially
dislocated, from the fi gural. To be sure, the whiteness of black-and-white illustration
asks to be taken for granted as a natural component of the medium and, in most
cases, we probably should do just this – look through instead of at it. As Du Maurier
himself explained, illustration is a medium of ‘conventional symbols’, where hatch
marks are made to stand for ‘depth of shadow’, and whiteness signifi es comparative
brightness, or at times signifi es nothing at all – the void of the unarticulated page.11
But if, as has recently been argued, whiteness is a category that ‘operates by being
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Jennifer A. Greenhill
“invisible”’, by being, that is, ‘so ubiquitous and entrenched as to appear natural and
normative’, it will only be known through an epistemological manipulation that
wrenches it out of the realm of the natural.12 As we shall see, for both Gibson and
Du Maurier, whiteness as a social value was critically bound up in, and constructed
through, an investment in that term’s aesthetic potential. In Gibson’s attempt to
distance his handling of the modern woman from Du Maurier’s rendition of the
same idea,13 evolutionary advancement is fi gured as a troubled abstraction which
nonetheless solidifi es his own claim to aesthetic superiority.
Drawing with FinishDu Maurier typically blots out the blank page; he rarely gives over much of the
composition to it (plate 4). He had a reputation for density, for a ‘wealth of execution’,
said the novelist Henry James, the illustrator’s friend and most astute critic.14 ‘Some
of these full-page pictures have an admirable breadth and vigor’, James said, referring
to the cuts that appeared in Punch, ‘though they sometimes strike us as rather too
black’. They are too black because they are fi lled with a thousand little lines cutting
here and then there, in long diagonals, short curves or squiggles that fi ll up the space,
doing their best to denote texture and depth within what James called ‘the narrow
limits of black and white’. This was ‘almost academic’ drawing, said James.15 Other
critics confi rmed James’s view,16 and contrasted Du Maurier’s work with that of the
man he replaced at Punch in the mid-1860s, John Leech.17 Leech would zig and zag
his lines with a free hand so that they appear somewhat coarse and slapdash next
to Du Maurier’s precision.18 ‘“Punch” had never before suspected that it was so
artistic’, said James, before the ‘fi nish and delicacy, the real elegance’ of Du Maurier’s
2 Charles Dana Gibson, untitled illustration in Pictures of People, New York and London, 1901. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
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Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
drawings.19 The engraver who translated Du Maurier’s
compositions and prepared them for reproduction for
much of his career rarely had much room to interpret
since, as Marion H. Spielmann noted, Du Maurier’s
line was ‘too delicate, sympathetic, and precise to leave
room for anything but the strictest possible facsimile’.20
In an illustration from Gibson’s series of drawings
devoted to life in London, produced after a trip there
in 1896, the younger illustrator offers his take on
the master’s technique, on its taste and fi nish (plate 5). Gibson had visited Du Maurier once before when
he was just starting out, to show him his work and
ask for his advice; he reportedly introduced himself
by saying, ‘I draw and you have been my master for
years.’21 Gibson included a stand-alone portrait of Du
Maurier in Life in London and, in this image, at the far
right of a gathering of distinguished guests, including the novelist Anthony Hope and
possibly other English luminaries behind.22 In front of Du Maurier stands a woman
who spreads open a highly decorated fan, covering the illustrator’s body to set off his
face. Fans appear everywhere in Du Maurier’s drawing room scenes as the favoured
feminine accoutrement, whether folded or splayed out to frame the female form (see
plate 4). The train of the central fi gure’s dress spreads out on the fl oor behind her in
a fan-like formation. This is where the illustrator signs his name, as if to claim this
motif and acknowledge its signifi cance.
Gibson seems to be echoing this association by setting the fi gure of Du Maurier
against that highly worked fan, which relies on the high contrast between dark
blacks at the edges and the glowing, open white space at centre, a compositional
framework favoured by Du Maurier (see plates 6–8). Gibson thus enacts a kind of
homage to Du Maurier’s trademark technique – his dense, laboured vignettes devoted
to the activities of fashionable society and glorifying the ‘high-bred English girl’ in
particular. But this may be critique as well. The woman who holds the fan with an
air of circumspection as she glances in the other direction offers a decorative answer
to the fan’s dense and rigid organizational scheme in the puffy folds of her sleeve,
which sits at the same level. Further left, and rendered with an even freer hand, is
the costume of the woman who looks in the direction of Du Maurier. Signifi cantly,
it is here that Gibson makes his mark, gliding his signature through an abstract
network of lines perhaps meant to denote ruffl es or folds. If Gibson signs his portrait
of Du Maurier directly beneath the fi gure, so that it appears that his signature is
pinned beneath the leg of his idol’s chair, here in contrast he occupies a distanced
position (plate 9). Both illustrators were known, primarily, for their rendition of elite,
fashionable womanhood; here they meet in a kind of face-off, with Du Maurier
representing academic fi nish and Gibson situating himself, through his signature, at a
distanced remove to occupy a space that breathes a bit more, that foregoes crisp cross-
hatching for lines that spread out and open up to broad expanses of untouched page.
Artistic Dialect and AbstractionFrom the age of fi ve, Gibson had worked creatively with white, making it signify
materially by cutting silhouettes out of white paper which he mounted on black so
that their contours could be perceived (plate 10). A family photograph shows him with
one of these silhouettes, which were exhibited in New York when he was just a boy
3 Edward Kemble, ‘Felix and the Teacher’, in Marietta Holley, Samantha among the Colored Folks, New York, 1894, 143. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
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Jennifer A. Greenhill
(plate 11).23 Before he drew, Gibson cut, and he did so by moving the paper instead of
the scissors, demonstrating an exceptional ability to hold the concept of the fi gure
in his mind as the paper danced around it.24 Gibson’s art was thus, from the start, in
a sense austere, even minimal – he would later say that all an illustrator needed was
white paper and black ink, nothing more.25 But the work also exhibited a remarkably
sophisticated sense of the fl exibility of formal economy.26 In his later illustrative
work, Gibson would continue to make whiteness signify and explore how forms
might emerge from the space between what is carved out or delineated. But he would
4 George Du Maurier, ‘Social Agonies’, Punch, 75, 27 July 1878, 35. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
5 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘Distinguished Guests’, in London as Seen By Charles Dana Gibson, New York, 1897. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 738
Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
forego the sharp outline of the silhouette for broken
contours, in the service of design that works harder to
court abstraction.
At times this amounts to an oscillation between
dimensions, so that space reads in terms of both surface
and depth. In a page from the folio Pictures of People (1901), Gibson distances foreground from background
by contrasting the thick, juicy blacks used to defi ne
the fi gure with her back turned toward us with the
fainter lines that defi ne the fi gure facing her and which
trail off at the neck and sleeve (see plate 2). A double
perspective informs our view, so that it feels split: we
look slightly down on one fi gure while looking at the
other head-on. Because of this, and because Gibson
leaves the space between the two fi gures unarticulated,
he raises questions about their spatial location. Is the
face we see the mirror image of the face turned away
from us? Is this a distanced refl ection? The dark rings
of the glass, in the foreground left, may be picked up
just to the left of the woman’s hand, at centre. A dark
vertical line divides that arm, as it might if the arm
were pressed against the fl at surface of a mirror, next
to its refl ection. But the women’s postures are not that
close; one leans over, while the other sits upright. Are
they instead meant to be friends sitting across the table
from one another?
This seems to have been the case when the
composition appeared in Robert Grant’s The Art of Living (1895), a life handbook for the ‘smart set’. Gibson’s
illustration appears in the chapter treating house
furnishings with the caption ‘The modern dinner-
table’. The text surrounding the image complains
about the modern woman’s tendency to ‘crowd her
table with every article of virtu she possesses … until
one is unable to see at any one spot more than a square
inch of tablecloth’.27 Gibson’s image foregoes all of
this ornament to visually reinforce the text’s argument
for restraint. When he reproduced the composition in
Pictures of People, Gibson further economized by leaving
out the anchoring caption. Without the competition of the explanatory text, Gibson’s
airy signature at the bottom left achieves greater prominence as a kind of notational
scheme. The ‘C.’ and ‘D.’ of ‘C. D. Gibson’ break open to loosely frame unmarked
space, which also sits at the heart of the fi gural arrangement above. In this way
Gibson insisted that we focus on this aspect of the composition, its ambiguity and
semiotic fl exibility.
Gibson liked pictorial puzzles, but they most often appear to have a ready
solution. Indeed, this is crucial to the joke work of pictures like ‘Puzzle: Find the
Heiress’ from 1895 (plate 12), which asks the viewer to discern from the arrangement
of bodies the relative wealth and thus desirability of three women. The one
surrounded by three male suitors is the winner. More interesting is Gibson’s play
© Association of Art Historians 2011 739
Jennifer A. Greenhill
with degrees of fi nish in those two isolated fi gures; the leftmost one occupies a space
that is rather ornate in detail, while the central zone of the composition negates
this rhetoric, empties it out. Asking the viewer to begin reading at the left in order
to meet the visual punch line at the composition’s right edge, Gibson thus staged a
progression, a move from one zone, one aesthetic tactic, to the next.
Critics began to notice a change in Gibson’s art at this moment, in the mid-1890s,
after he had spent time in Paris, in 1893, and then in London, between 1895 and
1896. His work in these years became more ‘experimental’ said the critic and editor,
Charles Belmont Davis.28 Indeed, the woman whose back we glimpse in plate 2 has
a Toulouse-Lautrec-ian sort of élan as she dips down in her chair, her posture and
décolleté signalling a modern ease of being far removed from starched Victorian
constraints. Gibson’s fl uid style has the same self-assurance and openness about it.
He started out in the fi ne-line technique of Du Maurier, but by the mid-1890s he
turned toward a freer use of black and white, which critics like Davis saw as a stylistic
advancement. Gibson, Davis said, ‘gradually drew away from his fi ne-line drawing,
and told his story in a few bold strokes where he would formerly have used an
hundred’.29 Critics appreciated the ‘expressiveness’ and ‘unusual strength’ of his line,
particularly since it was produced by (as Gibson described it) the ‘cruel’ medium of
pen and ink. ‘[T]here is no more exacting medium of expression than pure line’, said
one writer, ‘there are none of the accidental effects of colors blending into each other
which sometimes surprise the painter himself and are beyond his best ability.’ Unlike
painting, you could not ‘fake’ pen and ink: ‘it is hard-and-fast and irrevocable’.30
These accounts testify to the changing status of illustration during the late
nineteenth century, when the medium attracted better artists and began to be seen
as a legitimate – and not just pot-boiling – alternative to painting (despite the way
Henry James presented it in his short tale, ‘The Real Thing’ of 1892).31 Advances
in printing showcased draughtsmanship and gave illustrators greater control over
their fi nished products. With photoengraving, the
camera replaced the artist-engraver as the intermediary
between the pen-and-ink sketch and the published
image.32 Thus, Gibson and other illustrators working
around the turn of the century had technical
advantages over their predecessors.33 Critics presented
him as an uncompromising minimalist fi rmly in the
avant-garde, ‘in advance of his fellow-workers’ Davis
confi rmed.34 Gibson had learned, he said, ‘to make
one line tell as Kipling does an adjective’.35 Through
his economical use of line, Gibson opened up line’s
potential to signify on its own and in multiple
directions – as outline but also as distance, say; and
what was not touched by Gibson’s line is as signifi cant.
The untouched page, which links and
simultaneously distances the two women in plate 2 is the
indeterminate, syntactical centre of the image. Because
it asks to be read as a marker of spatial distance, or the
zone of some unarticulated ‘content’, the unmarked
area acts like an abstraction – some formal device
that frustrates mimetic clarity and thus promotes the
viewer’s engagement in the image’s construction.
This void that anchors Gibson’s delineation of his two
6 Detail of Gibson, ‘Distinguished Guests’.
7 George Du Maurier, ‘Annals of a Retired Suburb’, Society Pictures from ‘Punch’, vol. 1, London, 1891, 108. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
8 George Du Maurier, ‘A Pathetic Appeal’, Society Pictures from ‘Punch’, vol. 1, London, 1891, 107. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
9 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘George du Maurier’, in London as Seen By Charles Dana Gibson, New York, 1897. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
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Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
subjects therefore assumes great signifi cance as a kind of compositional linchpin
and interpretive cue. It might also be the true subject of his work. If we can extend
the contemporary critic’s literary analogy to Kipling, we might think of Gibson in
relation to Henry James, who was somewhat critical of Du Maurier’s technique, as I
have suggested.
In The Later Style of Henry James, Seymour Chatman examines the critical function of
abstraction and ‘abstractness’ in the novelist’s late work – qualities usually credited as the
causes of the late work’s ‘diffi culty’.36 Although James produces abstraction in myriad
ways, I am most interested in the way an ideological construct – like freedom, say –
can occupy this space as an idea suffi ciently abstract to elude easy comprehension.
The characters within the novels work hard to discern the signifi cance of these ideas
in relation to the fi gure with which they are associated, but they often falter. Take
a passage from The Wings of the Dove (1902): ‘On all grounds, at any rate, the relation
between Kate and freedom, between freedom and Kate, was a different one from
any he [Densher] could associate or cultivate, as to anything, with the girl who had
just left him to prepare to give herself up to him.’37 Kate, yoked to the abstraction,
freedom, becomes a kind of unknown. Densher fl ips the two terms in his mind –
freedom and Kate – but clarity does not emerge from the conceptual rearrangement.
(That third term, Milly, an American contrast to Kate, only complicates matters
further.)38 Abstractions in James often ‘occur in important syntactical positions
like that of grammatical subject’, Chatman explains. ‘Indeed, it often seems as if
James created characters as anchors for abstractions’, he writes, rather than using
abstractions as constitutive of his characters.39 The character, as it is delineated,
does not matter as much, then, as the abstractions that butt up against and extend its
contours, opening them up so that they evade precise location.
Abstraction in Gibson cannot be said to arise from a fi eld of discursive
misdirection, as it often does in James. But his attempt to focus the viewer’s attention
on the ends of his lines and the space between them is a contemporary analogue
for James’s project. By evacuating his compositions of the dense line work that had
defi ned Du Maurier’s imagery, Gibson gives the bright space of the blank page a
new kind of presence and potential to signify. In a compelling analysis of Alexander
Cozens’s work, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn argues that white spaces push a sketch
away from ‘iconic representation’; that is, they leave ‘something to the imagination’,
allow the mind to play with and supplement the visual information.40 Understood
in this way, the white spaces of Gibson’s work come even closer to James’s literary
abstractions. Both writer and illustrator leave the ‘syntactic completion’ of ideas open
10 Charles Dana Gibson, silhouette, in Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C. D. Gibson, New York, 1936, 6.
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Jennifer A. Greenhill
and invite reader/viewer participation.41
Other illustrators like Phil May, at Punch (whom
Gibson also memorialized in his London series)
and Penrhyn Stanlaws at Life, also avoided elaborate
linear description and worked against the previous
generation’s tendency to see mark-making as the surest
route to signifi cation.42 In a Life cover from 1899, for
example, Stanlaws – a Scottish artist who worked in
New York before moving on to a directorial career in
Hollywood – uses the sparest outlines to delineate his
fi gures and draws attention to this by highlighting the
alternative: a kind of description that convincingly
communicates refl ections of light and volume in
the hair of the fi gure at the far right (plate 13). Phil
May would do something similar in the contrasts he
presented between fully worked faces and cartoonishly
simplifi ed fi gures. Both illustrators draw attention to
their stylistic departures from the mimetic standards
that black-and-white illustrators had perfected in
their quest to approximate three-dimensional form
and chromatic variation within the limitations of the
medium. Although the contrasts set up in ‘Puzzle: Find
the Heiress’ might be related to these efforts, Gibson
was less interested in contrasting alternatives of fi nish
– as Stanlaws and May seem to have been – than in
foregrounding aesthetic progress as a fl exible idea, as
something in motion.
That these graphic artists of the 1890s drew
attention to these sorts of stylistic choices suggests the
value of trademarking a unique style in this period,
which generated signifi cant stylistic variety. Illustrators
in the 1890s enjoyed more fi nancial success, celebrity
and opportunity than ever before, as the demand for illustrated literature and
journalism increased exponentially. But they were also an embattled group who
had to work against growing concerns that there were simply too many pictures in
books and magazines, as well as complaints that illustrations distracted from textual
information and were, perhaps worse, often of poor quality. Because illustrators
commonly crossed the boundaries between art, reportage, and commercial
advertising, the need to distance one’s work from one camp or another was built
into membership in this diverse community of artists.43 By drawing attention
to the voice of the individual artist, illustrators like Gibson moved the medium
into a new golden age. The English illustrator Walter Crane explained the graphic
artist’s choices in Darwinian terms, which signals how much survival depended on
stylistic innovation. ‘By a kind of “natural selection”’, Crane said, ‘we fi nally arrive
at a choice of line’, which would be different for every artist due to ‘natural bias …
personal character and preferences’. Based on these specifi cs, ‘a kind of evolution
goes on’ in the artist’s technique. He fi nds that he is ‘led to repeat a particular kind
of stroke, a particular degree of line’, and thus formulates an individual style ‘by
which his work is instantly known, like a friend’s handwriting’.44 This was the
artist’s particular ‘dialect’, Crane said, and critics employed this rhetoric to explain
11 ‘Charles Dana Gibson cutting silhouettes at eight years of age’, in Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C. D. Gibson, New York, 1936, 11.
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Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
Gibson’s particularity. Gibson’s ‘artistic dialect … is not the suggestion of a brogue,
not the indication of a recent immigrant’, said one commentator in 1901, but was
instead ‘essentially genteel, cultured [and] fashionable’.45 By collapsing Gibson’s
social position into his work, critics demonstrated the period’s inclination to read
racial and ethnic identity not only at the level of iconography, but also at the level of
expressive or stylistic approach. Gibson’s style appeared to advertise an artist not only
culturally and socially but also ethnically evolved. It thus crucially reinforced his art’s
focus on evolved white bodies (an exclusive club to which he himself could claim
membership).
Whitishness and IndeterminacyBorn in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1867, Gibson could trace his heritage back to the
earliest English settlers and he merged easily with English high society when visiting
London.46 That critics read this heritage into his dialect is therefore unsurprising.
Collier’s, the publishing house that made Gibson the highest paid illustrator in the
United States when he signed a contract with them in 1903, promoted the art by
promoting the racial ‘stock’ of the man.47 This rhetoric likewise informed the
reception of his work in England. His art was written ‘in honest Anglo-Saxon’,
said Spielmann.48 Life, the journal with which Gibson began his career, likewise
favoured the Anglo and urbane, although it liked to make the case that American
democracy was far removed from the Old World’s caste hierarchies and aristocratic
snobbery. Indeed, Gibson had himself mocked the Anglomania of his day within
the pages of Life, in a cartoon from 1888 which shows an American dandy aping
the style of a British aristocrat.49 By the turn of the century, the American imitation
of Britain would extend beyond sartorial affectation into fi elds of geopolitical
12 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘Puzzle: Find the Heiress’, in Drawings by Charles Dana Gibson, New York and London, 1895. Photo: Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 743
Jennifer A. Greenhill
contestation. The American Reverend Josiah Strong had linked the two countries on
the basis of their expansionism as early as 1891: ‘This mighty Anglo-Saxon race’, he
wrote, ‘though comprising only one-thirteenth part of mankind, now rules more
than one-third of the earth’s surface, and more than one-fourth of its people.’50
The controversial successes of the USA and Britain a few years later in Cuba, the
Philippines and South Africa, seemed to seal Anglo-Saxon supremacy, which Life promoted, despite its misgivings about the ideology fuelling this expansion.51 This
ambivalence is evident in a William Walker cartoon, ‘The Anglo-Saxon’s Mission’,
which critiques the circumstances of this new Anglo-American bond (plate 14). In
order for the Anglo-Saxon mission to be fulfi lled, other races would have to fall back,
be assimilated or, as Walker suggests, annihilated.52
In its effort to complicate the closing gap between the USA and Britain, Life stressed the heterogeneity of the American populace, which connected the country
to ‘all peoples around the globe’.53 Gibson seemed to support this view when he
13 Penrhyn Stanlaws, ‘Getting Acclimated’, cover of Life, 28, 19 November 1896. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
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Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
told the Times that his girl combined ‘the best points of all those many races which
have helped to make our population’. Indeed, Gibson called specifi cally on Israel
Zangwill’s hit play of 1908, The Melting Pot, when he explained his girl’s mission.54
Zangwill, an English Jew and son of eastern European immigrants, portrays the USA
as a site where markers of European difference would be melted away, although he
seems to have been himself somewhat ambivalent about this process.55 ‘America is
God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and
re-forming’, the play’s protagonist argues.56 By not standing out racially or ethnically,
immigrants would more readily assimilate into American society. Progressives like
Theodore Roosevelt deployed this rhetoric to demonstrate the American system’s
benevolence. But this paternalism also of course masked the violent realities of
imperialism and the anxious desire to maintain Anglo-American political and social
supremacy at home.57
Gibson’s notion that the American girl of the future would combine the best points
of the races but look essentially white fi ts with this rhetoric. His statement has the ring
of tolerance but cannot help but be informed by the period’s racist paternalism. At
times, Gibson’s work appears to refer obliquely to the imperialist project, particularly
when his woman fascinates or lords it over submissive subjects. Displacing power
from the male body by making it crawl toward enlightenment or, alternatively, beg
for mercy, Gibson recasts imperialist power relations as a gendered interaction. The
unforgiving searchlight of manifest destiny, colonizing the dark corners of the earth,
becomes the aura encircling an angel (see plate 1); the big-stick wielding new world
power becomes a New Woman daintily prodding her diminutive captive (plate 15). In
these images and many others, Gibson’s women are larger than life superior beings
who have evolved above and beyond their male counterparts.
14 William Walker, ‘The Anglo-Saxon’s Mission?’, Life, 34, 26 October 1899, 330–1. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
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Jennifer A. Greenhill
Woman is the fi gure for the inscription of racial politics in Gibson’s art, and he
uses her in a variety of ways. In ‘Her Nightmare. How She Saw Herself’ from 1896,
for example, Gibson uses the female fi gure to make a Social Darwinist argument
about the perils of standing out too sharply instead of blending in (plate 16). The
woman in this illustration stands off to one side of a room fi lled with gentlemen
who ignore her presence (at least this is how the caption tells us she experiences
the scene). With her brow anxiously raised and the right side of her face and neck
disfi gured by heavy shadow, this is the girl made to seem ungainly, made to stand
out as frozen and unnaturally statuesque – voided, it would seem, of life. Although
Gibson marked this fi gure out as a material presence with unyielding, uninterrupted
contours, he nevertheless fi gured her as a kind of social void. If ‘[becoming] too
visible [marked one] out for extinction’, as Martha Banta has argued of racial and
ethnic minorities at the turn of the century, Gibson’s art internalizes this Darwinian
principle – thematically, here, and in other works at the level of design.58 In plate 2, he
opens up the familiar compositional and narrative frameworks to push into another
type of space – a kind of unknown or potentiality that depends explicitly on the
indeterminacy of whiteness.
This indeterminacy was especially evident in American legal discourse of the
period, which, in response to applications for naturalization, attempted to discern
who precisely qualifi ed as a ‘white person’. In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), Matthew Frye Jacobson charts the shifting
conceptual and perceptual boundaries of whiteness in American history as the
category narrowed and expanded in response to immigration patterns, scientifi c
discourse, the political climate, and so on. The judge for an 1878 case concerning
15 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘The Weaker Sex. II’, c. 1903. Pen-and-ink drawing, 29 × 23 in. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Department. Photo: Library of Congress.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 746
Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
a Chinese immigrant, for example, admitted that ‘[t]he words “white person” …
constitute a very indefi nite description of a class of persons.’ But, he maintained,
‘one would scarcely fail to understand that the party employing the words “white
person” would intend a person of the Caucasian race.’ The ‘Mongolian or yellow
race’ should not be included in ‘the white or whitish race’, he argued. The use of the
term ‘whitish’ here is revealing. The term ‘Caucasian’ was supposed to clarify the
vagueness of the category ‘white persons’ and situate race as an inalienable biological
fact. But ‘whitish’ put the burden back on phenotype and muddied already imprecise
racial boundaries (and the equally imprecise ways of measuring the ostensible
distance between them). Those who argued for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon
did so, then, against the backdrop of this imprecision. Whiteness would remain
an abstract idea in the courts into the twentieth century – it would evade precise
location.59 Deployed as a means of identifying and codifying individuals, it only
raised further questions. Although it functioned as an exclusionary construct, then,
whiteness maintained remarkably fl exible contours.60
Excursions into the ImpossibleGibson’s art – which, as I have suggested, connotes ‘progress’ through its
experimental use of the blank page, through its play with the indeterminacy of
that white space – intersects with these discourses. However distanced his visual
experiments might seem from these social and political concerns, they weirdly
echo the structural logic of conversations about whiteness around the turn of the
century.61 Race would seem to be irrelevant in this imagery, which sublimates racial
politics, but that is precisely why it is so effective as an argument about the aesthetic
superiority of whiteness. Du Maurier may help us to see better how this works.
There is a moment when Du Maurier departs from his usual technique, when
he too investigates the communicative potential of the unmarked page to make it
16 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘Her Nightmare: How She Saw Herself’, Life, 27, 21 May 1896, 410–11. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 747
Jennifer A. Greenhill
unusually palpable. In Punch during the 1880s, Du Maurier dedicated a series to the
activities of the Brown family, who coat their bodies in ‘luminous paint’ in order to
continue their leisure pursuits after nightfall (plate 17).62 ‘A Brilliant Idea’, reads the
legend for this image published in October 1881, which depicts the Browns and their
friends dancing in the dark as spectral presences possessing otherworldly brightness.
In the place of the detailed cross-hatching that defi nes Du Maurier’s work – we see
a residue of this in the fi gure of the musician at the far right – each of the luminous
bodies is described through a limited number of thin black lines framing expanses of
white. If whiteness is a naturalized category that can only be known if it is wrenched
out of the realm of the ‘natural’ and into the space of the unfamiliar, Du Maurier’s
series makes this process explicit by suggesting that whiteness becomes visible only
when it is made to seem strange, when its ‘lightness’ is made into a tangible property.
He may have been inspired by electric lighting, which began to colonize the night
sky of urban centres around this time. The image owes as much, however, to Du
Maurier’s aesthetic predilections and utopian goals, which imagined a future world
of perfect beauty according to precisely these sorts of mechanical contrivances.
Indeed, this image epitomizes what James called ‘du Maurier’s fantastic’, his
‘excursions into the impossible’.63 If white supremacy is a ‘mystical idea’, as Laura
Wexler has argued, nowhere is this more apparent than in Du Maurier, where
whiteness is always fantastic, majestic, and otherworldly.64 James thought Du Maurier
17 George Du Maurier, ‘A Brilliant Idea’, Punch, 81, 22 October 1881, 182. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 748
Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
had a ‘peculiar perception of the look of breeding, of race’, but the artist seemed
always to take this perception too far, so that his high-bred English women were all
‘monotonously’ and ‘colossally fair’. The ‘English form … was above all’, James said,
‘a great length and a great straightness, a towering brightness.’65 Even when he tried
for variety, Du Maurier couldn’t help falling into the same pattern.66 These were the
fi gures he loved to draw. With the exception of the lead character in Trilby, he in fact
rarely depicted the lower classes, whom he found aesthetically wanting.67 (It is of
course signifi cant and perhaps not surprising that Trilby quickly rises up the social
ladder to fulfi l the destiny of greatness encoded in her height. As she does so, she
becomes magically paler, her eyes brighter, and her teeth whiter; she becomes, as
Sarah Gracombe has pointed out, more ‘properly “English”’.68 ) When Du Maurier
worked in racial or ethnic variety – as he did in Trilby through the crudely stereotyped
Jewish maestro, Svengali – he did so in order to reinforce his ideal through the
comparison.
In Du Maurier’s last novel, the science fi ction fantasy, The Martian (1897), his
obsession with towering brightness takes a weirdly eugenic turn.69 Although
eugenic ideas informed social theory well before the nineteenth century, the term –
drawn from the Greek for ‘wellborn’ – was coined in the early 1880s by the English
polymath Sir Francis Galton. Inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and
fuelled by the application of these ideas by the Social Darwinists, Galton considered
how man could assist nature in selecting the fi ttest by controlling reproduction.70
Eugenic thinking took hold in several countries around the turn of the century, but
it fl ourished especially in Britain and the USA.71 Indeed, the more radical supporters
of the ‘Anglo-Saxon mission’ in both the UK and the USA viewed eugenics as a
viable means of ensuring its success. Although the Gothic edge of this project is
unmistakable, supporters of eugenics in this period optimistically asserted that it
would ‘save the world’ from the kind of decline and degeneration that theorists like
Max Nordau saw as already under way.72
This is the view promoted in The Martian. The partially blinded protagonist of the
book, Barty Josselin, can see more than most and perceive beauty more fully too, and
this ability inspires his tireless promotion of aesthetic perfection through selective
breeding.73 Those who might pass on physical fl aws, he feels, should not reproduce.
The narrator of Du Maurier’s novel, who is a kind of inferior double of Barty, plays
this role. He will not procreate because he wants to avoid passing on physical defects
like his crooked nose. Barty is himself, however, very good for breeding. Born to
a French woman and an English Lord, he combines the best of their traits to stand
at over six feet tall with an athletic build and classical features. (There’s a bit of
autobiographical hubris here, as this somewhat doubles Du Maurier’s own genetic
make-up.)74 Barty is indeed special: he discovers after nearly committing suicide over
his bad eye that he has the ability to see internally into space. He communes with a
female presence from Mars – aptly named Martia – who colonizes his mind and body
in order to help him to achieve his intellectual destiny. While he sleeps, she writes
best-selling books in his own hand – books as infl uential, we are told, as Darwin’s
Origin of Species. Once her work with him is complete, she is reborn as his daughter in
order to stimulate the continued development of the race, which, like that on Mars,
‘is still developing towards perfection with constant strain and effort’.75
With this interplanetary narrative, Du Maurier followed writers like Edward
Bellamy and H. G. Wells, who hypothesized about unknown realms and the look of
the future in these years.76 But Du Maurier’s vision is profoundly conservative where
that of Wells is not. In A Modern Utopia from 1905, Wells critiques utopian literature
© Association of Art Historians 2011 749
Jennifer A. Greenhill
that makes perfection a goal, rails against ‘Anglo-Saxonism’, and denounces the
‘new arbitrary and unsubstantial race prejudices … shaping policies’.77 In his utopia
there would be no perfection, no racial purity, no ‘state breeding of the population’.
One could, furthermore, only classify peoples and types provisionally, since ‘ideas
of a modern Utopia imply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities,
a certain universal compensatory looseness of play’.78 In the place of this open-
ended social model, Du Maurier offered infl exible categories, as at least one critic
pointed out in reviewing The Martian. ‘[H]is fondness for tallness has grown so morbid
a passion that all good people are tall, all wicked people short’, said one English
reviewer, pointing out the starkness of Du Maurier’s categories and his problematic
limning of physical and moral characteristics.79
But I’m not sure that this assessment does justice to the complexity of Du
Maurier’s aesthetic ideal, which had deep personal signifi cance for him. Like
the protagonist of The Martian, Du Maurier had been suddenly and mysteriously
blinded in one eye; this occurred in 1857 while he was drawing from a female
model. Thereafter, the fear of total blindness, he said, ‘poisoned his existence’.80
In his literary work, this anxiety at times bubbles up in what he calls ‘uncalled-for
digression[s]’ about the ‘beautiful human eye!’ that ‘star’, which ‘lets the broad white
light of infi nite space … into one pure virgin heart, to be fi ltered there! and lets it
out again, duly warmed, softened, concentrated, sublimated’.81 His illustrated work
at times buzzes with the same anxieties. That the illustrator would imagine a level
of brightness in The Browns series that he would never have been able to witness
himself because of his sensitivity to light makes it into a kind of personal fantasy
about what it would mean to see in such an intense way. Working in his illustration
toward the kind of aesthetic and social perfection championed by the characters
in his novels, Du Maurier invested bright whiteness with personal meaning as an
indication of evolutionarily advanced vision.
Yet whiteness is an inherently unstable category, both as a social ideal and as an
aspect of illustrative design. The Browns series speaks evocatively to Du Maurier’s
fantasy of a kind of supersight that could, if only temporarily, defeat the dark. Like
the protagonist of The Martian, they are a superior race of beings who adapt to and
transcend the limitations of their environment. But as night’s artifi cial candles,
they will eventually burn out to blend back into the darkness they so unnaturally,
for a spell, defeated. Their powers are thus fundamentally fragile. If Du Maurier’s
investment in bright whiteness insists on its futuristic otherworldliness, and hence
unattainability, as a social ideal – if (that is) the aesthetic in Du Maurier wears its
ideological signifi cance openly – his art may help us to see the social implications of
Gibson’s formal choices.
ConclusionGibson’s experimental use of the blank page, his investment in it as organizing
principle of his art and sign of his position in the avant-garde, weirdly reinforces his
evolutionary vision of a future when racial and ethnic variables would be sloughed
off to reveal an increasingly purifi ed – that is, for Gibson, Anglofi ed – American
woman. The rare appearance of an African-American fi gure, in ‘The New Hat’
(1906), makes the racial imbalance that structures Gibson’s art explicit (plate 18). Here
six women move across the compositional space, from right to left, with varying
degrees of energy, determination and grace. Although they are distinguished by class
and by age, fi ve are racially unifi ed through the contrast presented by the last lady in
line. In this scheme, the African-American is just one more of Gibson’s types, socially
© Association of Art Historians 2011 750
Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
integrated by the way she relates formally to the rotund woman four fi gures in front
of her. But, bringing up the rear, she exists almost as an afterthought, the last stage of
this scrambled Darwinian diagram. Bookending the other side of the composition
is that Gibson Girl, whose features echo those of the woman at centre, whose own
balanced proportions signal evolutionary superiority. The leftmost fi gure’s form is
not contained like the rest, however; her left sleeve breaks open to the white page, to
denote perhaps distance or separation. Gibson favoured this descriptive mode in plate 2, where he stretched its potential in a closed circuit where race would seem to be
irrelevant, sloughed off, out of view.
This is the key difference between Gibson’s work and Du Maurier’s, which
formulates white supremacy in awkwardly original terms as a futuristic and
otherworldly mechanical contrivance. Gibson, by contrast, sublimates racial politics.
The apparent irrelevance of race is, of course, the fundamental power of Gibson’s
art as an argument about the aesthetic superiority of whiteness. Through the ease of
effort communicated by Gibson’s style, that superiority appears as a kind of given, an
inevitability, a powerful bourgeois ‘myth’ in the terminology of Roland Barthes.82
The notational character of Gibson’s compositions amplifi es the familiarity of the
concept as already processed, already ostensibly known.83 But the notational, which
also functions as a kind of abstraction, works in other ways as well. It evokes the thing
in process, in the midst of formulation. As Martha Banta puts it, the Gibson Girl is ‘the
dream at the point of coming true’.84
Gibson’s elision of whiteness and progress – both in his illustrations and in his
assertion that his ideal girl drew together the ‘best points’ of ‘many races’ – is abstract
18 Charles Dana Gibson, ‘The New Hat’, in Our Neighbors, New York and London, 1906. Photo: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 751
Jennifer A. Greenhill
NotesI am grateful to Eric Segal, Ruth Iskin, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Emily Burns, David Peters Corbett, Jules Prown and Bryan Wolf for giving me the chance to test out parts of this material at various venues. I also thank John Fagg, Jason LaFountain, Sarah Monks, Alex Nemerov, Susan Power, Jennifer Roberts, Irene Small, Terri Weissman, and Cécile Whiting for their challenging and insightful questions and suggestions. Diana Post graciously allowed me to reproduce Gibson’s silhouettes and Elizabeth Milroy made this possible by putting me in touch with the artist’s family. Adam Thomas and Amy Weber provided critical research assistance and Diana Zion and Helena Richardson assisted with illustrations.
1 On Gibson’s career, see Fairfax Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by C. D. Gibson, New York, 1936. See 383 for a list of these folios. See also
Frederick W. Morton, ‘Charles Dana Gibson, illustrator’, Brush and Pencil, 7, February 1901, 283–4.
2 Several scholars have noted the limitations and exclusivity of Gibson’s
formulation of the modern woman. See, for example, Martha H.
Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915, Urbana and Chicago, IL, 2005.
3 Edward Marshall, ‘The Gibson Girl analyzed by her originator’, New York Times, 20 November 1910.
4 Marshall, ‘The Gibson Girl’.
5 Robert W. Chambers, ‘Ave Atque Vale, Gibson!’, Collier’s, 21 October
1905, 14. ‘In his range of types [Gibson] has been nearer du Maurier
than [other English illustrators]’, echoed S. N. C. ‘Future of Charles
Dana Gibson’s work’, Brush and Pencil, 16, November 1905, 167.
6 Although Gibson had his detractors – some questioned the humour of
his jokes or critiqued the derivativeness of his drawing room scenes,
which owed much to Du Maurier – most American and British critics
marvelled at his precocious talent and stressed his originality. See,
for example, Arthur Hoeber, ‘A century of American illustration’,
Bookman, 8, February 1899, 541–2; and Charles Belmont Davis, ‘Mr.
Charles Dana Gibson and his art’, The Critic, 34, January 1899, 48–55.
For texts comparing Gibson and Du Maurier, in addition to those
cited above, see ‘Mr. Gibson and his girls’, The Critic, 22, 17 November
1894, 335; ‘An American illustrator’, The Academy, 55, 24 December
1898, 514; Marion H. Spielmann, ‘On Charles Dana Gibson – Apostle
of American beauty and humour’, Magazine of Art, 1 (new series),
January 1903, 16–18; [Robert Bridges], Charles Dana Gibson: A Study of the Man and Some Recent Examples of His Best Work, New York, 1905; Marshall,
‘The Gibson Girl’; Downey, Portrait of an Era, 86–7. See also the series of
‘Anglo-American Vignettes’ comparing these two ‘widely different
schools of illustration’, which appeared in Life between 6 February
1896 and 23 April 1896.
7 See, for example, ‘One of the disadvantages of being in love with an
athletic girl’, in C. D. Gibson, The Social Ladder, New York and London,
1902, n.p. Du Maurier’s woman was, in contrast, mostly confi ned to
the drawing room. Frederick Dolman, ‘Keene and Du Maurier: The
men and their methods’, Strand, 28, October 1904, 439–40 explains
that Du Maurier was ‘practically restricted to interior subjects’
because of his ‘sadly defective sight’, which I discuss later in this essay.
For Du Maurier’s account, see his ‘Social pictorial satire – Part II’,
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 96, March 1898, 513.
8 Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History, New York, 1987, 213.
9 Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, Berkeley, CA, 2005; Angela Rosenthal, ‘Visceral culture: Blushing and
the legibility of whiteness in eighteenth-century British portraiture’,
Art History, 27, September 2004, 563–92. She cites Richard Dyer on the
‘“unraced” norm … against which all difference is measured’ on 567.
10 Other scholars who have attended to the structuring principles of
black and white material (with compelling results) include Michael
Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization, Minneapolis, MN, 2008; Caroline Arscott, ‘Stenographic notation:
Whistler’s etchings of Venice’, Oxford Art Journal, 29, 2006, 371–93;
Charles Rice, ‘Seeing whiteness in colour’, in John Tercier, ed.,
Whiteness, London, 2000, 197–218; and Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, ‘In
black and white’, in Norman Bryson, ed., Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, Cambridge, 1988, 131–53.
11 Du Maurier, ‘Social pictorial satire’, 507. Walter Crane made similar
claims in Of Line and Form, London, 1900, 28. I thank Morna O’Neill for
pointing me to Crane’s text.
12 Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica and
Matt Wray, eds, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, Durham, NC and
London, 2001, 10.
13 See Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s equation of the Gibson Girl with Du
Maurier’s Duchess of Towers in Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 31.
14 Henry James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, Century, 26, May
1883, 56. On the friendly rivalry between James and Du Maurier, see
Jennifer A. Greenhill, ‘Illustrating the shadow of doubt: Henry James,
blindness, and “The Real Thing”’, in Catriona MacLeod, Véronique
Plesch and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds, Elective Affi nities: Testing Word & Image Interactions VI, Amsterdam and New York, 2009, 261–80.
15 James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, 56, 53; and Henry James,
‘George du Maurier’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 95, September 1897,
600.
16 Dolman, ‘Keene and du Maurier’, 441; W. Delaplaine Scull, ‘George
du Maurier, Romanticist’, Magazine of Art, January 1892, 230.
17 Dolman, ‘Keene and du Maurier’, 439–41. See also Henry James,
‘George du Maurier’, in Partial Portraits, London, 1888, 327–72, esp.
348.
18 See Du Maurier’s description of Leech’s technique, in ‘Social pictorial
satire’, 507.
19 James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, 54.
20 Marion H. Spielmann, The History of ‘Punch’, London, Paris and
Melbourne, 1895, 513.
21 See Downey, Portrait of an Era, 84. Before being published in book form,
these drawings were published in ‘London as seen by C. D. Gibson’,
Scribner’s, 21 and 22, February 1897, 182–7; March 1897, 370–5; April
1897, 494–9; May 1897, 626–31; June 1897, 758–63; and July 1897,
82–7. 22 See J. A. Reid, ‘Charles Dana Gibson and his work’, Art Journal, February
in the extreme. Imagining what ‘will’ and ‘has’ infl uence(d) her beauty, his argument
occupies two temporal registers to situate his creation somewhere in between. In
these ways, perhaps, Gibson loosened up Du Maurier’s rigid polarities, putting them
in motion. And yet Du Maurier’s and Gibson’s projects are not so different. In reacting
against his predecessor’s overworked density, Gibson learned how to make whiteness
material. But because he formulated it as an abstraction, he located it as an unknown,
as an ideal not yet realized, and this ends up tying him to Du Maurier in ways that
have not yet been acknowledged. Whiteness is, for both of these artists, materially
unstable – it oscillates between visibility and invisibility, between substance and
void, to powerfully evoke the ambiguity built into the idea of evolutionary progress
and the complications of its registration in black-and-white illustration.
© Association of Art Historians 2011 752
Whiteness in Charles Dana Gibson and George Du Maurier
Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, New York, 1891, 210.
51 For a short time around the turn of the century, statesmen and
cultural critics seriously debated the value of bringing the ‘English
race’ back together in a ‘common nationality’. See A. V. Dicey, ‘A
common citizenship for the English race’, Contemporary Review, 71,
April 1897, 457–76; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. edn, New York, 1959, 172–83; and Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904,
East Brunswick, NJ, 1981. See also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge
and London, 1998, 205–13, on the uses and abuses of the ‘ideological
banner of Anglo-Saxon supremacy’.
52 See Josiah Strong’s prediction in ‘The Anglo-Saxon and the world’s
future’, 225, that ‘this race … is destined to dispossess many weaker
races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until … it has
Anglo-Saxonized mankind’. Martha Banta, ‘The company one
keeps’, in Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936, Chicago, IL and London, 2003, 183–229, discusses Walker’s cartoon
and Life’s ambivalence about American imperialism.
53 Banta, Barbaric Intercourse, 190.
54 Marshall, ‘The Gibson Girl’.
55 See Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Work of Israel Zangwill, Tuscaloosa, AL and London, 1990, 5. On Zangwill’s complex
play, see Werner Sollers, ‘Melting pots’, in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, Oxford, 1986, 66–101.
56 Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto, 194.
57 See Amy Kaplan, ‘Black and blue on San Juan Hill’, in Amy Kaplan and
Donald E. Pease, eds, Cultures of United States Imperialism, Durham, NC,
1993, 219–36, for an insightful consideration of how the politics of
social mixing and hierarchies at home were played out on foreign soil
during the war with Spain.
58 Banta, Imaging American Women, 230. Banta is referring to Thorstein
Veblen’s social theory about the conspicuously useless here; she
explores the visibility of racial and ethnic minorities in her second
chapter, ‘Looking for the “best” type’, 92–139. See esp. 105–9.
59 For a discussion of this court case and others, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, esp. 227–9.
60 Indeed, Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, makes the case that
whiteness should, at various points in the country’s history, be seen as
inclusionary. See, for example, 39–40 on the 1790 naturalization law
granting citizenship to ‘free white persons’.
61 My thinking on the interrelation between structural forms of the
social and the aesthetic owes much to Wai-chee Dimock’s ‘Rightful
subjectivity’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 4, 1990, 25–35, esp. 28–9.
62 I also discuss this image in Greenhill, ‘Illustrating the shadow of
doubt’, 261–80. I thank Editions Rodopi for allowing me to reprint
parts of my argument about it here.
63 See James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, 54.
64 See Laura Wexler, ‘The fair ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in
1904’, in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Durham, NC and London, 2006, 271–96, esp.
282–3.
65 See James, ‘Du Maurier and London society’, 55, 56; James, ‘George
du Maurier’, 597.
66 See Du Maurier, ‘The illustrating of books. From the serious artist’s
point of view – II’, Magazine of Art, 13, 1890, 372.
67 Richard Kelly, The Art of George du Maurier, Basingstoke, 1996, 24. Henry
James complicates this view in Partial Portraits, 357, 359, 363.
68 Sarah Gracombe, ‘Converting Trilby: Du Maurier on Englishness,
Jewishness, and culture’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 58, June 2003,
75–108, esp. 85.
69 ‘Selective breeding was one of du Maurier’s favourite hobby horses’,
writes Leonée Ormond, George Du Maurier, Pittsburgh, PA, 1969, 488.
70 ‘Eugenics co-operates with the workings of nature by securing that
humanity shall be represented by the fi ttest races. What nature does
blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and
kindly’, said Galton in his 1909 collection, Essays in Eugenics, quoted in
Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives, Nashville, TN, 1968, 27.
On Du Maurier’s imagery as Galtonian, see Spielmann, The History of ‘Punch’, 510.
71 See Mark B. Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France,
1900, 44.
23 See Downey, Portrait of an Era, 6–13; and Banta, Imaging American Women, 212.
24 See Christine Terhune Herrick, ‘The Gibson Boy. (Paper-cuttings by
Charles Dana Gibson when a boy.)’ St. Nicholas; an Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, 23, February 1896, 268–72.
25 ‘Beginners are worried needlessly over the quality of paper and ink
to be used. It is only necessary that one should be white and the other
black.’ ‘A Letter from Mr. Gibson’, Collier’s, 15 October 1904, 11.
26 Banta, Imaging American Women, 212, likewise notes that Gibson’s
‘compositions make adroit use of the white areas of the page’. He
was, she writes, ‘a master of the pure forms carved out of space by the
strong lines of his pen’.
27 Robert Grant, The Art of Living, New York, 1895, 101.
28 Davis, ‘Mr. Charles Dana Gibson and his art’, 55.
29 Davis, ‘Mr. Charles Dana Gibson and his art’, 53–4. On Gibson’s early
fi ne-line technique in the manner of Du Maurier, see Downey, Portrait of an Era, 86.
30 See Thomas E. Curtis, ‘The humorous artists of America. – I’, Strand, 23, March 1902, 306; Morton, ‘Charles Dana Gibson, illustrator’, 280;
and Robert Bridges, ‘Charles Dana Gibson: An appreciation’, Collier’s, 34, 15 October 1904, 13.
31 On the rising status of illustrators, see William A. Coffi n, ‘American
illustration of to-day, fi rst paper’, Scribner’s, 11, January 1892, 106; and
Michele H. Bogart, ‘The problem of status for American illustrators’,
in Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, Chicago, IL, 1995, 15–78.
James’s illustrator saw things differently in ‘The Real Thing’. See
Henry James, Complete Stories, 1892–1898, New York, 1992, 34.
32 See Banta, Imaging American Women, 212.
33 S. N. C., ‘Future of Charles Dana Gibson’s work’, 167, notes changes in
‘[m]ethods of drawing and printing’. See also a comparison between
techniques employed at Punch and Life, specifi cally, in Robert Bridges
(‘Droch’), ‘The fi rst years’, Life, 81, 4 January 1923, 23.
34 Davis, ‘Mr. Charles Dana Gibson and his art’, 50.
35 Davis, ‘Mr. Charles Dana Gibson and his art’, 54.
36 Seymour Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, Oxford, 1972, 2. I thank
John Fagg for pointing me to Chatman’s study.
37 See Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, vol. 2, 1902; reprint New York,
1909, 89.
38 ‘Milly was forward, as might be said, but not advanced; whereas Kate
was backward – backward still, comparatively, as an English girl –
and yet advanced in a high degree.’ James, The Wings of the Dove, vol. 2, 89–90.
39 See Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, esp. 22–3.
40 Lebensztejn, ‘In black and white’, 142.
41 Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, 86, suggests that ‘a thoughtful, a
puzzling-out attitude’ is ‘the kind of reading that James wanted’, and
that certain terms or ideas are ‘diffi cult not only because [they are]
abstract but because [their] syntactic completion is left to the reader’.
42 For a thoughtful analysis of May’s technique, see Ernest Knaufft,
‘Drawing for illustration’, The Art Amateur, 40, January 1899, 35–6. See
also Simon Houfe, Phil May: His Life and Work, 1864–1903, London, 2002.
On Stanlaws, see Thomas E. Curtis, ‘The humorous artists of America
– II’, Strand, 23, April 1902, 445.
43 See Neil Harris, ‘Pictorial perils: The rise of American illustration’,
in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, Chicago, IL and London, 1990, 337–48; and Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art.
44 See Crane, Of Line and Form, 49, 24.
45 Morton, ‘Charles Dana Gibson, illustrator’, 279.
46 See Downey, Portrait of an Era, 231–2. A review of London as Seen by Charles Dana Gibson in The Academy, 52, 11 December 1897, 523, argued that
‘Gibson was at his best in ‘Society’ scenes’, and was ‘not truly himself
except among swallow-tailed coats and low necks’.
47 See [Robert Bridges], Charles Dana Gibson: A Study of the Man and Some Recent Examples of His Best Work, n.p. See also Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art, 26; and Downey, Portrait of an Era, 274–86.
48 Spielmann, ‘On Charles Dana Gibson’, 15.
49 See Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America, New Haven and London, 1996, 102.
50 Rev. Josiah Strong, ‘The Anglo-Saxon and the world’s future’, in Our
© Association of Art Historians 2011 753
Jennifer A. Greenhill
Brazil, and Russia, New York and Oxford, 1990. The two international
congresses on eugenics, in 1912 and 1921, convened in London and
New York, respectively. See Problems in eugenics: papers communicated to the fi rst International Eugenics Congress held at the University of London, July 24th to 30th, 1912, London, 1913 and Scientifi c papers of the second International Congress of Eugenics: held at American Museum of Natural History, New York, September 22–28, 1921, Baltimore, MD, 1923.
72 In 1909, a leading advocate of eugenics in Britain, Caleb Williams
Saleeby, affi rmed that eugenics would ‘save the world’. G. R. Searle,
Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900–1914, Leyden, 1976, 1, quotes
him and suggests ‘these words capture the mood of exuberant
optimism within a movement which seemed about to sweep
aside all the obstacles in its path. A similar state of affairs existed
in America.’ William H. Schneider, ‘The eugenics movement in
France, 1890–1940’, in Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science, 69, argues
that eugenics was, in part, a reaction to the notion that Western
industrial society was in decline, which Max Nordau famously
declared in Degeneration. Published initially as Die Entartung in 1892 and
translated into English three years later, Degeneration was extremely
controversial but it solidifi ed a language – already in circulation –
for denouncing dangerous or apparently amoral tendencies in art.
Although Du Maurier looked suspiciously on the aesthete’s excesses,
he seems to have nonetheless been interested in the potential social
uses of artifi ce, of (as the consummate aesthete, Whistler, might say)
surpassing or improving upon nature. For an excellent and concise
discussion of aestheticism, degeneration, and Du Maurier’s role in
conjoining those terms, see Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 79–119.
73 George Du Maurier, The Martian: A Novel, New York, 1897. See especially
304: ‘Barty’s senses were not as other men’s senses. With his one eye
he saw much that most of us can’t see with two; I feel sure of this.’
For a concise summary of the text, see Richard Kelly, George du Maurier, Boston, MA, 1983, 125–53.
74 Kelly, The Art of George du Maurier, 1–14, provides a concise summary of
the artist’s background. See also Ormond, George Du Maurier.75 Du Maurier, The Martian, 368.
76 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, Boston, MA, 1888; H.
G. Wells, The Time Machine, London, 1895. Du Maurier is of course
also drawing on the late nineteenth-century fascination with the
similarities between Earth and Mars, which the spectroscope made
newly visible. See Paul Fayter, ‘Strange new worlds of space and time:
Late Victorian science and science fi ction’, in Bernard Lightman, ed.,
Victorian Science in Context, Chicago, IL and London, 1997, 256–80, esp.
268–73.
77 H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, London, 1905, 328–9.
78 Wells, A Modern Utopia, 182, 262, 265, 270. See also Marvey N.
Quamen’s insightful ‘Unnatural interbreeding: H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia as species and genre’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 33, 2005,
67–84. Wells, on 202, also denounces the ‘contemporary woman of
fashion’ who acts, much like Gibson’s Girl, as a ‘stimulant rather than
a companion for a man’.
79 See the review of Du Maurier’s book in The Saturday Review, 84, 9
October 1897, 398. See also ‘A great amateur’, The Academy, 53, 18 September 1897, 69–71.
80 See Du Maurier, ‘Social pictorial satire’, 513–14; and Addison Bright,
‘Mr. Du Maurier at home’, The Idler, 8, December 1895, 415–16.
81 Du Maurier, Trilby, New York, 1894, 265–6.
82 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth today’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers,
New York, 1972, 109–59.
83 I thank John Fagg for suggesting that I consider the relation between
the notational and the already known in Gibson’s work.
84 Banta, Imaging American Women, 213.
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