Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn as a Mosaic of American Culture | Page 9

Book cover illustrations by Sarah Wyman Whitman, Courtesy of the
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of
Rochester Library
publisher Houghton Mifflin. She began designing stained
glass and was asked by one of the premier stained glass
designers, John La Farge, to design carpets and stained glass
windows for H.H. Richardson’s Trinity Church in Copley
Square. Her windows in Harvard’s Memorial Hall are par-
ticularly celebrated. Art historian Virginia Raguin, quoted
from the Harvard Library Bulletin in the January-February
2010 Harvard Magazine, calls her “Peace and Honor”
window, which commemorates soldiers who served in the
Civil War, “one of the most successful opalescent designs of
its time” and “legendary for its brilliance.”
She gave time and funding to diverse educational institu-
tions serving groups largely disenfranchised by American
society: Tuskegee Institute (for African Americans), Berea
College (for the Appalachian poor), and the Harvard Annex
(women), which eventually became Radcliffe. Said William
James of her death: “She leaves a dreadful vacuum in Bos-
ton…and the same world is here—but without her to bear
witness.” She designed a number of monuments at Mount
Aub urn, including her own.
Creator of an American Icon:
Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944),
Illustrator and Cartoonist
Lot #3629, Halcyon Ave
Charles Dana Gibson was born in Roxbury, Mass. Even
as a young man, he was artistically precocious, skilled at
fashioning silhouettes of family, friends, and animals. At 13,
he became an apprentice to Augustus
Left, opposite: Sarah
Saint-Gaudens, but didn’t take to sculpture.
Wyman Whitman (1842-
Instead he enrolled in the Art Students
1904) by Helen Bigelow
League in New York, and, in 1885, had a
Merriman, Oil on canvas,
drawing accepted by the humor magazine,
39.5x28”,Courtesy of
Life. On a journey to London, he met
Harvard Art Museum,
Fogg Art Museum, Har-
George du Maurier, the Punch cartoonist
vard University Portrait
famous for his depictions of tall, stately
Collection, Gift of Helen
women. Du Maurier was a major influ-
Merriman to the Schle-
ence on the younger artist’s style.
singer Library, Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced
Study, 1909-10, H770
Photo: Katya Kallsen ©
President and Fellows of
Harvard College
Soon, Gibson’s illustrations were being published in
Harper’s, Scribner’s, and The Century. He developed the
“Gibson Girl,” partially inspired by Irene Langhorne, the
aristocratic Virginian he eventually married.
The Gibson Girl was no passive society belle or frail
neurasthenic but elegant, confident, athletic, and assertive—
depicted as swimming, playing tennis, and even at the
wheel of the new “horseless carriages” or automobiles.
More than a century later, she endures as a symbol of the
early 20th century.
“My mother was Charles Dana Gibson’s daughter,” says
Irene Goodale of Atlanta. “I was about fourteen when my
grandfather died, and I knew him well. We used to visit
him summers at his house on 700 Acre Island in Maine. I
can still see him in his white Adirondack chair under the
big copper beech on the lawn.
Charles Dana Gibson, Courtesy of the
Library of Congress, Grantham Bain
Collection
“When we were small, he
used to scratch our backs while
my grandmother played the
piano and sang. Whenever we
grandchildren wore something
he liked, he’d ask us to sit in his
studio while he sketched us. So
Charles Dana Gibson’s iconic
we’d
be inside for a couple of
Gibson Girl
hours while everyone else was
outside, playing. We soon learned not to wear anything he
liked so we wouldn’t get stuck indoors, posing.
“My grandfather taught all of us to sail, and while we were
sailing he’d drop his hat or something else into the drink so
we had to change course and go back to get it. Eventually
we realized he was doing this on purpose so we would
learn how to turn a sailboat. He also loved working with his
hands; he built his grandchildren a playhouse and a little sort
of castle out of bricks and stone at the house in Maine.”
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