William Hamilton Gibson: artist—naturalist—author

by John Coleman Adams

Six years later, coming back to the same subject in a letter to Colonel Gibson, he defends water-color as a medium in the following hearty fashion:

“Concerning the ‘water-color’ subject, on which you say ‘Of course water-color painting is not or cannot be high art, because it concerns itself too much with detail’ (not verbatim but embodying your

The Struggle for Life

First Watercolor

expressed idea), I regret that a man in your position should decline from the standard to which his namesake had elevated him, and come down to such a statement as that. Color is color, whether it is mixed with water or oil, and you can make a broad flat tint in oil-color or water-color just as you choose. There is no reason why one should use ‘one-hair brushes’ in water-color painting either. Neither is there any reason why he should paint more detail in the one than in the other. You should have had one glimpse of the last W. C. Ex. It would have made you open your eyes. I never saw stronger or broader pictures in oil than some that were in that exhibit. Neither does the medium make a snap of difference, excepting so far as it cramps the hand that wields it. The talk about ‘body color’ is a ‘hobby horse’ for art critics to ride on when they get ‘run out’ of their vocabulary. I use both, so do several others, some to such an excess as to abuse it and spoil the result. It should not be used to tell as paint, but to express texture or relief in an object where such qualities are important requisites.”

His own work in this medium showed the same steady and constant improvement as his work with the pencil. He toiled incessantly, and with his toil his power and facility grew. Remembering that he was self-taught in all his art-work; that he wholly lacked the training of the schools; that all his studies had to be made in the rush and under the pressure of his intensely busy life; yet that all of these studies were good enough to have a market value, and to take rank as works of art, his professional career is indeed a marvelous one. It was soon apparent that he was to take his place among the leading workers in color, and in an astonishingly short time he was recognized as one of the first water-colorists in America. He brought the same dash and fervor and sincerity to the color-box that he bestowed upon monotone. He was as ambitious to excel in this field as in his earlier one. He overcame heavy odds, chief among which was a popular prejudice that a man who does one thing well cannot do anything else. The public had come to rank him as a master in illustration. It was not readily converted to the notion that he might take as good a position in color-work. The critics talked, as critics will, in much this strain. “He is not a colorist,” said one. “His best work is in monotone,” said another. “He has won more admirers by his black-and-white work than he ever will win as a water-colorist,” wrote a third. They evidently had not heard the tale of his early attempts, and had not the fear of his caricatures before them. Gibson lived to confute their judgment and to prove his power as a colorist. That he had the root of the matter in him, and that he was qualified by temperament to see and feel the power of nature’s glowing hues he shows in a few lines of revelation, written out of his inmost spirit.

“How many beautiful pictures have I seen emerge from a cloud of dust upon a country road! How many of those pictures have again been half obliterated by the dust of after-years, only to be recalled to life by even so trivial a thing as the bleating of a lamb, the ring of a boyish laugh, or the homely music of the falling pasture bars!

“Pity for him whose heart knows no such sensitive and latent chord of sympathy to yield its harmony along the way, lending an inspiration to the present, while sanctifying the past, and drawing from its better memories a renewed delight in living! There is no walk in life, however dull or prosaic, no circumstance so commonplace, that they can stifle this ever-present melody. It sings in unison with nature in a thousand different keys—in a falling leaf or a cricket’s song. The rain-drops of to-day but repeat the old-time patter on the garret-roof. The noisy katydid, whenever heard, is that same untiring nightly visitant outside your window to whose perpetual whim you loved to listen, and in fancy tantalize until you dropped off to sleep upon your pillow. This skimming swallow sailing near will never cross your path but so surely will he fly to those same old nests beneath the barn-yard eaves. If there is ever a blessed mood ‘most musical, most melancholy,’ it may be found beneath the refining influence of just such reminiscences; for whether or not there are added elements of home association, there are always a legion of indelible memories that love to linger along the country road and lane—highways and byways beloved of fancy—paths of recollection filled with footprints which not even the tempest can obliterate.”

One rarely finds a profounder analysis of the true mean between breadth and detail, between effect and incident, nor a truer affirmation of one of the neglected sources of power in translating the larger aspects of the world than in the following: