William Hamilton Gibson: artist—naturalist—author

by John Coleman Adams

CHAPTER III
A QUICK SUCCESS

FROM this time forward, Gibson’s success as an artist was assured. And not very long after, he was induced to try his hand at authorship, with results quite as convincing. During the summer of 1878 he spent his vacation, in company with his wife, in the old homes at Newtown and at Washington, Connecticut. Returning to the city in the autumn, and recounting his delightful experiences to Mr. Alden, the editor of “Harper’s Magazine,” the latter insisted that Gibson should put them into an article which he should also illustrate. But even with the practice which he had given himself, in the brief articles he had furnished with many of his drawings, he distrusted his own capacity for literary work. He had no such innate sense of power to write as made him so confident with his pencil. He demurred at the proposition; but Mr. Alden was firm and persistent. “Write it just as you have told it to me,” was his encouraging word. His suggestion was followed, and in the August number of the monthly appeared an affectionate sketch of the old boyhood homes, under the title, which was but a thin disguise, “Hometown and Snug Hamlet.” It proved an instant success. The note struck was genuine and pleasing. The illustrations won the public eye. The canny editor suggested a similar article which should cover the winter phases of country life in the same vein. It was prepared, and appeared in the number for March, 1880; and had a reception as enthusiastic as his former venture. The idea of completing the cycle of the seasons was inevitable, and in June there followed the article on “Spring-Time,” which was pronounced “the most attractive paper” of this number of the magazine, whose “rhythmic prose” was not less highly commended than its illustrations, which another critic called “almost as good as spring itself.” In November the series was rounded out with “An Autumn Pastoral,” which led a reviewer to say “Mr. Gibson is a great artist, and has a great future before him.”

In 1879 he furnished illustrations for E. P. Roe’s “Success with Small Fruits,” which appeared serially in “Scribner’s Magazine,” and which opened the way to an intimate friendship with the author. He made the designs for the poems of the Goodale sisters, “In Berkshire with the Wild-flowers.” But these were mere incidents in the work he was turning off, for half the firms in New York City, and on all sorts of subjects having to do with nature, with animal life, with flowers, and with fruits. In the spring he made a visit to “Roeland” to sketch, and he divided his August vacation between Connecticut and the White Mountains, where he gathered material for a year’s hard work. He busied himself, too, with work in water color, steadily keeping his ideals in mind, and his own art-training in hand.

In the fall of 1880, the four papers which had appeared in “Harper’s Magazine” were collected and published in a sumptuous volume, entitled “Pastoral Days.” It was a book which yesterday would have been called “epoch-making”; to-day it would only be called “record-breaking.” The simple truth about it is that it really touched the high-water mark in the history of nature-illustration by means of wood-engraving. It was everywhere hailed as exhibiting the very best work of its kind ever achieved. The praise which fell to Gibson himself was twofold; for it was an enthusiastic recognition of his talent both as author and as artist. His engravers were applauded for the skill and spirit with which they interpreted his designs. His publishers were commended for the unstinted generosity which had balked at no pains or cost. Even the printer received a curtain-call. For the “Evening Post” with great discrimination insisted that much of the success of the work was due to “another artist, whose name is nowhere given. That artist’s name is David Lewis and he passes his days in the press-room of Harper Brothers, amid the clatter of the printing-machines, engaged in the grimy work of his office.” The “Evening Mail” expressed the unanimous verdict of art circles when it declared: “Writers on art spoke of the days of Bewick with a sort of despair, as though no one like him might ever be expected again. It has been reserved for the United States to show that wood has, for the purposes of engraving, capacities of which Bewick never dreamed, and to produce a school of artists who in treating landscape, at least upon wood, have surpassed everything on the other side of the ocean. In the first rank of these artists stands Mr. William Hamilton Gibson.” The London “Times” in a long notice spoke of his having “the rare gift of feeling for the exquisitely graceful forms of plant life and the fine touch of an expert draughtsman which enable him to select and to draw with a refinement which few artists in this direction have ever shown.” Even the “Saturday Review” in a notice a column and a half in length, confessing its ignorance of Mr. Gibson and his work, declared that his drawings were so full of delicate fancy and feeling, and his writing so skilful and graceful, that it hoped “to hear more of him soon, in either function or both.” In hardly more than two years from the time of his first illustrations Gibson had made his way to the very front rank of the world’s illustrators. His position was truly of his own achieving; and he never fell back from the eminence he had so fairly won. His friend Mr. Charles N. Hurd of the Boston “Transcript” does the situation no more than simple justice in a letter written upon reading the “Saturday Review” article:

“Transcript Office,
“324 Washington Street, cor. Milk Street,
“Boston, May 18, 1881.

“My dear Gibson:

“I congratulate you from the very bottom of my heart on the magnificent article on ‘Pastoral Days’ in the Saturday Review, which, you will see by the papers I send, I have copied into the Transcript. Nothing could have been more gracefully done, and then, in the Saturday Review, one of the very hardest to please of all the British journals! Why, my dear fellow, they never said half so much before of any literary American, living or dead. And there isn’t an ‘if’ in the whole article! I feel as rejoiced about it as if I had some personal share in the glory. If you haven’t a right now to carry your chin high on Broadway then nobody in New York has. I tell you, it’s a great thing to be appreciated; to get praise where you feel that it rests wholly and altogether upon the merits of your work, and has in it no spark of flattery. I can imagine how long the way home seemed that night, and how happy you two were in reading over what the two-thousand-mile-away critic had written. It is worth a good many years’ hard pulling to have one such day.”

One great and decisive reason why he moved on so steadily was his constant ambition to improve upon what he had done. One might easily be misled by the tone of his confidential letters to his mother and others into thinking him overconfident in himself, and a little puffed up by his quick and overwhelming success. But the thought would be absolutely unfair. He was not vain; he was never self-satisfied; he never rested in what he had achieved. After the rousing reception of “Pastoral Days,” he could write to Colonel Gibson in quiet Fryeburg: “I have just finished the last of my White Mountain illustrations—four months’ work—and am beginning a new series of original articles which shall ‘knock spots’ out of all past work. You ask in a previous letter, ‘Can you beat “Pastoral Days”’? Good gracious! The book is so full of shortcomings to me that I wonder at the astonishing appreciation of it. There are a few illustrations in it that I hardly expect to improve very much upon; but as to the average excellence I can ‘see it’ and ‘go a hundred better.’ Perhaps the result will not be as popular. Can’t tell. But I can do better work.” That was the key-note of his life. To do something better next time was the rule of his endeavor. To do something different each time, to turn some new page, follow some new trail, record some new traits of his favorite world, was another characteristic of his purposes. And it kept him from becoming repetitious and tiresome, as he repeatedly piqued curiosity with his novel enterprises in nature-study.

In the late summer of 1880 he spent six weeks in sketching among the White Mountains, whence he went to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for another six weeks of rest. He came home laden with sketches and with photographs, which were at once utilized in making the illustrations for Drake’s “Heart of the White Mountains.” He worked at these with diligence, as we have seen, never a day, apparently, passing without its picture; but it was far into the following spring before the series was finished. The volume was issued in 1881, but before its appearance he was well along with the text and the illustrations for the new articles in the magazine, in the same vein as “Pastoral Days.” In expanded form they were published in the fall of 1882 under the title “Highways and Byways.” It would have seemed improbable that the reception given to his first volume could be repeated. Novelty does so much with Americans to arouse enthusiasm, and they are so quick to compare the later with the former effort, that it might have been predicted that a second volume striking the same note as Gibson’s first success would not be so warmly praised. But the public liked the note, and it pronounced the new book better than the old. The press notices of ’82 and ’83 are in the same strain of unaffected admiration and delight as those of two years before. Perhaps he had most reason to be proud of the approval the new book won from the staid London “Academy” and from Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s “Portfolio.” The former, though a little late in discovering him was ingenious in its sweeping approval. “Fancy to yourself” said the “Academy,” “a Thoreau who has read both Darwin and Ruskin, and who has learned to use the pencil of Birket Foster. To this add the finest workmanship of the American school of wood-engraving, and all the luxury of the richest paper and the clearest type, and you may form some idea of the handsome book now before us. At first it attracted only by the rare delicacy of its drawings, which reproduce with unrivaled truth the exquisite tracery of vegetation, and the ‘ebon and ivory’ of Nature’s shadows. But when we discovered that the artist is also the author, we began to read; and we found ourselves unable to stop till we got to the end.” “We feel that we have here far more than in most American books, a genuine product of the soil.” Mr. Hamerton credits the new book with “a love of nature that is Wordsworthian in its reverence, the close and patient observation of an artist, the peculiar humor of a genial American in the study of men and things.” To such expressions as these, Mr. George William Curtis, voicing the sentiment of his own countrymen, said of him: “Mr. William Hamilton Gibson’s reputation as one of the first of modern artists for wood-engraving, is established and secure.” “It is hard to believe that the blended softness, vigor, and individuality of the art could go further than in the illustrations of this choice volume.”