“Trip to Europe. Left New York in April, returned in June. Visited England, France, Holland, Switzerland, including a fortnight each in London and Paris. Brought home over 300 instantaneous photographs, taken under all conditions by my detective camera. Went direct to Hilltop, and settled down to magazine work.”
These note-books carry the evidence of his faithfulness to his various aims and lines of interest. While he was at work as the artist, he never hesitated to do something for himself as either naturalist or author. He was never so preoccupied with his sketching that his ear could not catch a new bird-note, or his eye perceive an event in the insect-world. His color box often did duty as a botanist’s case, or bore home a load of cocoons and beetles. And when he sat down to record his impressions or outline his plans he revealed his triple interest in every line. Once he began certain memoranda which he headed “Night-Notes.” In the margin, by a dozen hasty lines with his pen he made a design for a title-page,—a lighted candle with moths flying about it. Then he wrote into his text ideas which should interest the future reader of some article, upon the scientific side, in sentences which suggest at once the illustrations and the text itself:
“Moths creeping up screen outside window, their presence marked only by their luminous eyes. The lamp the center of a whirling maze of all sorts of nocturnal insects. A rare treat spread on the table before me. Exquisite hints for the colorist, decorator, or illustrator. Here a dainty mite of a moth with the most delicate of sage-green, flat-open wings, crossed by bands of cream-color. Another with steeple-roofed wings (at rest) glistening like satin, decorated with faint contrast of pale pink and faded olive.” And so on for pages together.
Such passages as these from his own notes, never meant for the public eye, and therefore absolutely conclusive of his sincerity and his real spirit, show how truly he was an observer at first hand. He saw things for himself. There was not a trace of cant in what he had to say about original observation of nature, her wonders and her beauties. The thing he tried to lead others to do he had already done himself. A friend, who is himself a keen observer of nature, wrote of Gibson, at his death:
“It was to the habit of observation more than to any endowment that he owed the prosperity of his work,—for his life was a successful one. It enabled him to see clearly, without a teacher, what others find it hard to see at all. He acquired his art practically without instruction, and indeed against opposition, simply taking his pencil and brush into the field and drawing and painting what he saw there. The greatest painters are those who have pursued this method. As a writer and lecturer he showed the advantage of a good scholastic education; yet his themes were those he had chosen and worked out for himself. He was as well-informed on botany, entomology, ornithology, and allied studies as almost any professors of these sciences that could be named; yet it was in the woods and fields rather than in books that he acquired his knowledge.”
Gibson’s own words, in the preface to “Sharp Eyes,” confirm his friend’s reflection: “The facts in the following pages are almost entirely drawn from individual experience, largely gathered in boyhood, the apparently random selection being based upon a desire for the greatest variety possible within a limited range of the minor flora and fauna. The dates are apportioned from careful notes verified through a record of many years.”
It was this close and personal observation of nature which gave him his rare power in drawing and in composition. He never wished to make his pictures with the models, the objects he was drawing, before him. He studied them in sketches, and mastered every detail of their construction and appearance. This impression, clear-cut, exact, truthful, he carried in his memory. And when he wished to draw it, he worked from memory, refreshed, perhaps, by the memorandum of the sketch; but his picture would be suffused by the glow of his own imagination, idealized
“Wide-Awake Day-Dozers”
(“Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine”)
Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers