John Coleman Adams

IT is hard to say whether Gibson was first a naturalist and afterwards an artist, or first an artist and afterwards a naturalist. Art was his mode of expression; but his knowledge of nature furnished the material of what he would express. Art was his speech, but nature was his theme. In point of time there was no difference in the development of these two sides of his nature. His boyhood passion seemed to divide between studying nature and drawing pictures. He wrote of himself in “Pastoral Days” (p. 66): “Insect-hunting had always been a passion with me. Large collections of moths and butterflies had many times accumulated under my hands, only to meet destruction through boyish inexperience; and even in childhood the love for the insect and the passion for the pencil strove hard for the ascendency, and were only reconciled by a combination which filled my sketch-book with studies of insect life.”

His letters are equally full of the nature-subjects he is treating and of the ways in which he is treating them. But there is no question of the strong, irrepressible need of his spirit which drove him to self-expression by pencil and brush. “I am fairly crazy to get to painting,” he said to a friend at the beginning of the last summer of his life. “My lecture course and other business matters have kept me from using my brush lately, and I long to get my colors and go to work.” That was a remark which reveals his whole life, his constant mood. Not only was he always anxious to be at work, but he wanted to be at work with his colors. This urgency drove him to art as a profession. It lightened all his busy years. It ranked him by divine right among the best of American artists.

He was a thorough artist in his love of the technical side of his work. He delighted in mastery of the materials of art. He liked the problems growing out of them. He knew the tools of his craft, and never was hampered by any uncertainty as to what he could do with the means at his command. His use of pencil and brush began early, and he soon knew the possibilities of black and white and water-colors. He was quick to learn the special art of drawing upon wood, for the engraver. He had no fastidious scruples against the camera, but was swift to resort to it and learn its possibilities and make it into a tool to shape his thought. When he turned to color as a medium of expression, he did so with all the

[Image unavailable.]

Pen-and-Ink Sketch

From a Letter

enthusiam of a true believer in its power, and a purpose to get at all its resources. Although so much of his early work was translated to the world by the wood-engraver, yet when wood-engraving began to decline, and the publishers took to process-work, and the “half-tone” crowded out the fine, laborious work of the burin, Gibson was not in the least dismayed. He wasted no time or sentiment in mourning the decadent methods, but sought at once to learn the utmost what the new methods would yield to a determined and artistic mind. How successful he was is well shown in that beautiful volume which won such instant favor with his later constituency, “Sharp Eyes.” Its delicate half-tones vie with the wood-engraving in expressiveness, in delicacy, and in poetic feeling; and they are a standing testimony to the artist’s versatility and technical energy. He was never at a loss for a means of expression. The rudest tools were converted to delicate and sufficient implements in his fingers. There are letters from him describing some illustration of his or some painting, in which the pen and ink with which he wrote were made to sketch his work so vividly that one is tempted to rate the tour-de-force of the written page as fine a show of power as the picture it illustrated.

His work, moreover, was strong not only in its mastery of the science of expression, but by its fidelity to the facts of science in its subject-matter. It was a flat refutation of the doctrine, so dear to shallow sentimentalists, that the progress of science must weaken the power and circumscribe the field of art. There is much misleading talk to the effect that science is filching from the realm of the imagination, the kingdom where art thrives, and by its cold light is taking all the glow and loveliness out of the atmosphere in which the fancy has been wont to see its fairest visions. But almost any one of Gibson’s illustrations of natural history, of botanical subjects, or of open-air life and scenery sufficiently refutes this theory. Here is a mind at once faithful to the scientific method, and free in its artistic spirit. Here is the accuracy of the scientist’s eye and the artist’s creative imagination. Turning the pages of “Sharp Eyes,” or indeed almost any of his books, one knows not which to praise the more, his close observation of fact or his easy translation of it into the dress of fancy. One of his critics said: “His pictures sometimes seem ideal, they are wrought with such a light and painstaking touch. Yet close analysis will show them to be almost photographic in their accuracy.” However freely his fancy deals with the facts, he never violates their logic, nor misrepresents their substance. Mr. Roe, in a letter to Gibson once told him: “You understand nature, and are capable of seeing her as she exists. Most other artists have conventional ideas of nature. You can take an actual scene and reproduce it, while at the same time idealizing it.” His methods are a triumphant example of the scientific use of the imagination, and of the imaginative presentation of science. The most hardened Gradgrinds of research could find no fault with his facts, but were astonished and put to confusion by his power to suffuse reality with the glow of a poetic fancy. One critic, writing in the “New York Tribune,” did say of him, in the tone of one pointing out a limitation, “Nimble and agile as he was of intellect, he did not possess breadth and scope of judgment, nor maintain a deliberate balance of interests.” But even this farfetched comment did not deny his fidelity to the facts, but only claimed a tendency to give them wrong values; and moreover the critic was reckoning without a large knowledge of his mind. He confuses Gibson’s business as an artist with what his business might have been as a mere naturalist, and in doing so makes the common mistake of disparaging what is done by showing that it is not something which was not attempted.

Here, for instance, in a chapter on “Ballooning Seeds,” Gibson draws across a page what he calls a “fanciful eddy,” wafting up a swarm of seeds, which fly abroad on the autumn breeze. Every form in the airy sketch is accurate enough for a text-book, yet the whole is fit for the illustration of a poem. Again, in “A Masquerade of Stamens,” his pencil leads down the page out of a sunny meadow a long procession which, beginning in the grasses of the foreground, develops into the exactly drawn forms of a score of curiously fashioned stamens. The illustrations for “Queer Fruits from the Bee’s Basket,” with its decorated initial, showing just the right bee, investigating just the right flower; the laden bees hastening from the clump of bushes in the foreground to the distant hives behind the farmhouse; and finally the sketch at the close, of a group of the odd forms of pollen-dust which the microscope reveals;—these are all examples of a fancy which only serves to illumine, throw light upon, the fact, but never to distort it or to pervert it. In this phase of his work, Gibson carries the office of the illustrator to its highest possible point, and shows all its dignity and power.

He did all this in his own way. No artist of our generation was more thoroughly individual in his methods and in his aim. He sought what his own spirit loved and longed for. He saw with no eyes but his own. He drew and painted after his own fashion. His originality was absolute. He had none of the mannerisms of any man or any school but his own. He asked no one to tell him the color of the grass, or the fashion in which he should paint the clouds. What he did was his own work, what he saw was his own vision. What men called his “versatility” in the choice of “mediums” was his quick sense of fitness and of adaptation. His aim was never loyalty to a school, adherence to a method, repetition of a successful device of technique. It was always, rather, fidelity to nature, adaptation of the medium to the thing represented, variety of method to treat his various themes. If his style became characteristic, it was because he put his own strong mark on all his work. It was as much his own as his autograph. It was William Hamilton Gibson transferred to paper or canvas.

Gibson’s success as an artist was as good for the American people as it was for himself. It was truly a “popular” success. The people, and a great many of them, secured it. For he spoke to them, and they made approving answer. It would be hard to name an artist of his generation who appealed to a larger public, whose work in the magazines was hailed with a heartier delight, whose name stood for a more definite pleasure and appreciation than his. The people liked his work, and they knew why they liked it. One of his most discriminating critics said of him, in 1888:

“Mr. Gibson’s work has been essentially democratic, that is, has reached the many rather than the few, presenting to them studies of nature which stand for a great deal more than mere descriptive picturesqueness, because, as we have said before, they are informed not only with the feeling for the beautiful, but also with the scientific spirit of inquiry and a love of exact truth.” To gain such universal approval without the slightest swerving from his artistic integrity, or any lowering of his artistic standard, was an immense triumph. He realized it, and it gave him great joy. His honest and ingenuous pride in the reception accorded to his early work is well shown in two brief notes to his mother, one in May, the other in July, 1878:

“The bird article is finished and the proofs are beginning to pour in. One or two of them are so fine that their fame has spread over the city, and I am besieged by engravers and artists to see them. One, a full-sized peacock’s feather which takes up a full page of the magazine, is by far the most superb piece of wood-engraving that has ever been accomplished. It is spoken of in art-circles all over the city. It is the opening picture, and will create a sensation. The illustrations number sixteen in all, and Mr. Parsons told Mr. Beard and others that it was the most beautiful and at the same time the most expensive article the magazine had ever gotten up. Mr. Parsons told me that the drawings not only pleased him, but that they exceeded his highest expectations, and that he did not believe there was another man in this country or in any other that could excel them.”

In similar vein, after the notices began to appear, he wrote again:

“Brooklyn, July 27, 1878.

“Dear Mother:—

“I send you to-day a copy of the ‘Nation’ containing notice of Harper’s Magazine. The ‘Nation’ is a high authority and has the reputation of stating the truth. It seldom goes into ecstasies over anything, and such a notice as it has given of my ‘birds’ is considered by the Harpers as a magnificent compliment.”

The qualities of his art in which the public delighted and which came to be characteristic of all his work, were refinement, gracefulness, and truth. He saw the finer qualities of nature, sought out her delicate beauties, loved her humbler moods, objects, episodes. He vindicated his own taste in the paragraph with which he prefaced the chapter on “Sap Bewitched,” over the signature of “Plinius Secundus”:

“We wonder at the mighty and monstrous shoulders of Elephants, we marvel at the strong necks of bulls: we keep a wondering at the ravening of tigers, and the shag manes of Lions: and yet in comparison of insects there is nothing wherein Nature and her whole power is more seen, neither sheweth she her might more than in these least creatures of all.”

In the spirit of those words he wrought at his art. “These least creatures of all” found in him a loving exponent. He saw their charm, and he was not above interpreting it to others. The web of a spider, the nest of a bird, the down of the dandelion, the leaf of the jewel-weed, the tangle of grasses in a fence-corner, the vegetable contents of a city back-yard,—Gibson found beauties in all these least things, which he did not disdain to celebrate. He had learned from Thoreau, chief among American students and expositors of nature, the meaning of the proverb, “Natura maxima in minimis.” His devotion to the Concord recluse, and to his methods, appears in his studies. That discipleship affected his artistic life. It inspired him in his choice of themes and it drew his eyes still closer to the lesser objects and humbler horizons. He wrote to a friend in 1888:

“There are few authors whom I love more than Thoreau.... I have read him with love and reverence, and have visited his haunts as sacred ground, and have pictured those haunts in projected compositions, and yet hope to see them realized.”

He had no apologies whatsoever for having elected the field of what men call the minor forms of life. He knew there was no such thing as major and minor in the things of nature. One may go in either direction and find infinity. A telescope is no more effective than a microscope; and it begins to look as if the atoms would be found as marvelous as the universe. Gibson repeatedly preached this doctrine. In one place he said:

“There is often an almost inexhaustible field for botanic investigation even on a single fallen tree. My scientific friend already alluded to recently informed me, on his return from an exploring tour, that he had spent two days most delightfully and profitably in the study of the yield of a single dead

tree, and had surprised himself by a discovery by actual count of over a hundred distinct species of plants congregated upon it. Plumy dicentra clustered along its length, graceful sprays of the frost-flower, with its little spire of snow crystals, rose up here and there, scarlet berries of the Indian turnip glowed among the leaves, and, with the crowding beds of lycopodiums and mosses, its ferns and lichens, and host of fungous growths, it became an easy matter to extend the list of species into the second hundred. It is something worth remembering the next time we go into the woods.”

Such study and such affection made him the guide of a great multitude of people in America, teaching them of beauties and graces they had never perceived for themselves. To him thousands of men and women were under the deepest obligation, because he gave knowledge that in small areas and in close quarters one may see great beauties and far-reaching powers and forces. He taught by his art the greatness of the little, the divinity of the familiar. He revealed the wonders of the every-day world, the miracles of the commonplace. He seemed to discern, and had the power to show others, the whole of nature in her humblest parts. He was the prophet of the unnoted and the unprized; for when his appreciative pencil had drawn them, they straightway became noteworthy, brilliant, extraordinary. One feels all the power of this call of his to be the apostle of the unconsidered in a bit of rhapsody over the infinite pictures hung along any country roadside:

“See how the cool gray rails are relieved against that rich dark background of dense olive juniper, how they hide among the prickly foliage! Look at that low-hanging branch which so exquisitely conceals the lowest rail as it emerges from its other side, and spreads out among the creeping briers that wreathe the ground with their shining leaves of crimson and deep bronze! Could any art more daringly concentrate a rhapsody of color than nature has here done in bringing up that gorgeous spray of scarlet sumach, whose fern-like pinnate leaves are so richly massed against that background of dark evergreens? And even in that single branch see the wondrous gradation of color, from purest green to purplish olive melting into crimson, and then to scarlet, and through orange into yellow, and all sustaining in its midst the clustered cone of berries of rich maroon! Verily, it were almost an affront to sit down before such a shrine and attempt to match it in material pigment. A passing sketch, perhaps, that shall serve to aid the memory in the retirement of the studio, but a careful copy, never! until we can have a tenfold lease of life, and paint with sunbeams. But there is more still in this tantalizing ideal, for a luxuriant wild grapevine, that shuts in the fence near by, sends toward us an adventurous branch that climbs the upright rail, and festoons itself from fence to tree, and hangs its luminous canopy over the crest of the yielding juniper. Even from where we stand we can see the pendent clusters of tiny grapes clearly shadowed against the translucent golden screen. Add to all this the charm of life and motion, with trembling leaves and branches bending in the breeze, with here and there a flitting shadow playing across the half hidden rails, and where can you find another such picture, its counterpart in beauty—where? perhaps its very neighbor, for all roadside pictures are ‘hung upon the line,’ they are all by the same great Master, and it is often difficult to choose.”

Two letters must serve as types of hundreds which he received, from every quarter of this country and from England—from California and from Anticosti Island, from Minnesota and from Georgia. The people loved his work. It expressed things they all had felt. It revealed to them things they had never seen. It was at once interpretation and disclosure. They did not know how good it was technically, but they did realize that it was good art in substance and in spirit, and from grateful hearts and lives quickened and enriched by his genius they wrote him their letters of gratitude and recognition. This one is from a Massachusetts town:

The other letter is from his pastor:

. . . . . .

Gibson was a warm partisan of water-color as a medium of artistic expression. He believed thoroughly in the possibilities of that mode of painting, which, it will be noted, was by no means understood or well-developed in this country when he was beginning to paint. His views in reference to it are well set forth in a letter to his mother, describing his first picture for the Water Color Society’s exhibition, written in the winter of 1874. He says:

“I am at present busily engaged on my water-color painting for the coming Spring exhibition. It is only just under way, but all who have seen it express much pleasure and enthusiasm at it and particularly admire my selection of a subject. It would be difficult to find a subject calculated to create such popular favor, and you know that a good selection in this particular is ‘half the battle.’ The idea is this: Subject, a ‘Struggle for Life.’ It is indicated by an old, old tree (an oak if you please) growing under all possible disadvantages, and besieged with a host of parasitic growths which threaten to sap its vitality and hasten its death. The trunk and main portion of a few branches only are shown and but one or two of them are possessed of any leafage. The near portion is devoid of bark and the exposed wood, by the action of the weather without and decay within, has become stained and broken. The interior is hollow, and the rich brown debris of its decomposing wood falls through a large irregular opening at the base of the trunk, and then spreading itself on a moss and lichen covered rock becomes the prey to brilliantly colored fungi and mother to many ferns. The tree is supposed to have started life near a rock and in the course of time its roots have grown over its surface and again by the action of time and other causes are now bare of bark and some of them dead. Higher in the tree, an unsightly gaping hollow presents itself, left after the fall of some dead and useless limb and this, collecting the rain water from each successive shower, has caused the gradual undermining of the tree and hurried it to its approaching death. Close beneath this opening, true to nature, sapping what little life blood still circulates in the part clings a luxuriant clump of the deadly agaric (touch wood) which may so often be seen on trees that have passed their better days. These are not all the burdens under which this aged subject is struggling. The mistletoe has fastened itself upon its only living branch, and parasitic vines innumerable clamber up and surround the trunk in their ‘deadly embrace.’ A brightly colored woodpecker has just alighted on the dying tree and finds food in plenty in the substance of decay. The whole picture is intended to suggest the idea of a struggle, and I know that I can make it so plain that anyone will realize my intention. A little pool of rain water lies at the foot of the rock and touching the roots which will give an additional effect of reflection, and what with this, the warm coloring of dried fallen leaves relieved by a group of delicate ferns, and other like growths, together with a strong play of sunlight on the whole, I see no reason why the picture should not be a good success and feel equal to rendering all that my imagination suggests and pictures. I have only just commenced, but enough is even now suggested to insure an at least attractive result. I have selected the medium of water-color because I believe that more can be done with that than most people are aware. I can work faster with water-color and secure just as brilliant effect as I could in oils. People in general do not know how much can be done with water-color, and I hope that I may live to show them.”

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

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:

“‘There is as much finish in the right concealment of things as in the right exhibition of them.’

“Here is a key to the very heart of nature, if one will only use it. And I would but add my faint echo in an entreaty for a deeper sense of the infinity of nature’s living tone and palpitating color—a plea for the more intelligent recognition of the elements that yield the tint which we vainly strive to imitate upon the canvas. Such knowledge will give a voice to every pigment on the palette, and to the brush an answering consciousness; for, whether disciple of a school or not, whether artist, poet, or layman, who can deny that such an attitude toward nature shall yield a harvest of deeper knowledge, and increased delight, not merely in the contemplation of the footprint, but even as truly in the study of the limitless panorama?

“Is there not to me an added charm in the pink flush that mantles the side of yonder mountain-spur when I know so well that it is shed by the myriads of blossoms in an acre of glowing fire-weed? And as my eye follows the cool cloud-shadow as it glides down upon the mountain-slope, among the varied patchwork of its fields and farms, is there not a deepened significance imparted to every separate tint that tells me something of its being?

“If in the faint yellow checkered forms I see fields of billowing wheat and barley, and recall a hundred of their associations, or if from that quaintly-dotted patch there comes a whiff from a sweet-scented field, with its cocks of new-mown hay, its skimming swallows and ringing scythes, with here a luminous gray of sandy meadow fresh from the plough or harrow, and there a weed-grown copse lit up with golden-rod; if that kaleidoscopic medley of grays and olives and browns tells me of its pastures, with their tinkling bells, of its fragrant beds of everlasting, ferns, and hardhack, its trailing junipers and its moss-flecked bowlders, and each of these in turn draws me still closer, and whispers something of itself—the everlasting with its pendent jewel, the orchis with its little confidant and nursling, the gentian with its close-kept secret and its never-opened eye; if yonder bluish bloom means a field of blueberries to me, and that snowy sweep brings visions of the blossoming buckwheat field, with its symphony of humming bees—tell me, have I not only seen the mountain-slope, but have I not also heard its voice?

Such a man could not keep out of the field of color. The feeling in him had to express itself. He must interpret on the canvas what he saw upon the hillside. It was inevitable that he should soon win as hearty praise for his color as he had for his drawing. Of course, the reputation could not be as wide as that he had achieved as illustrator in black and white. Fewer eyes could see his paintings than had been regaled with his illustrations. But when he laid down his brush, to paint no more, he had made a name for himself as one of the foremost American water-colorists.

It is but fair to say that his later experiences taught him a larger respect for “oil” as a medium of artistic expression. He was so eager to enlarge his field of work that he could not but venture upon experiments which brought to him a new sense of power and a knowledge of resources hitherto untouched. A few brief entries in his journal show his state of mind, and his prompt surrender of former prejudices. In March, 1881, he wrote:

“Painting for three weeks on oil-pictures for Academy Exhibition. First attempts in oil for exhibition. Trouble with medium. Final triumph of mind over matter. Painted a week or more on large autumn study commenced at Williamstown. Grew frantic and in a moment of frenzy took a piece of pasteboard and palette-knife and produced strongest picture I ever painted, in less than fifteen minutes,—a revelation which gave me confidence. A victorious fight with an oil-tube which had threatened to get the better of me.”

A few days later he tried a similar study, with which he was even more satisfied. In another entry he says of this attempt:

“Much pleased with effect of sky I carried picture to a finish by four o’clock. Went out and ordered frame for it. A Diaz effect,—quite strong. What a revelation to me who, ten days ago, was disgusted with oil-color as a medium! I am all aglow with enthusiasm at finding another medium for the expression of my thoughts and feelings.”

From this time forward he knew that there were still greater possibilities before him than he had realized, and with the knowledge came a fresh ambition, a stronger challenge to his artistic nature.

The “smoke-pictures” which he executed were one more example of his versatility and delight in new and daring methods. He did a great many of them, and they attracted much attention. They were, briefly, black-and-white pictures made by a gas flame upon a cardboard or paper ground. In his first experiments he held the paper before a horizontal flame and by passing one part after another across the flame, secured masses of lamp-black, which he found he could manipulate to great advantage. Landscape, cloud-effects, deep shadows of night or storm were easily within reach. Afterward he attached a rubber tube to his gas-fixture, and with a suitable nozzle was able to sit at his easel and manipulate the pipe as he would a brush. After the paper was well coated with varying shades of gray and black, he would work up the picture with brush or finger or palette-knife, deepening the tones, when desirable, by more smoke, lightening them by scraping and rubbing. The total effect was broad, yet marked by gradations so fine as to be almost beyond the reach of ordinary methods of black-and-white work; while the rich, velvety textures were of a depth quite remarkable. Though he never devised any method of “fixing” the smoke, yet after the lapse of a dozen years, these pictures, when preserved under glass, have kept all their original brilliancy and force.

But all that Gibson had done in his artistic career was to him only an apprenticeship. He meant more than he achieved. He was on the way to better things, when death stayed his feet. With all his tremendous intensity, his restless industry, his fulness of conception and scheme, he was yet a man of undreamed-of patience. He saw far ahead of what he had reached, and planned for it, and meant to attain it. He himself regarded all that he had done in black and white, in water-color, even his beginnings in oil, as only the preparation for a larger, stronger art, in which he should interpret the spiritual side of Nature. There was always before his mind a dream of the subtler phases of natural beauty, the deeper meaning she conveys to the listening soul. He was feeling, with more and more force every day that he lived, the spell of

and the passion grew within him to paint, in the most permanent and adequate medium, the things he was coming to feel and to see. Art was really his goal. Painting was his crowning ambition. His own view of his life was that he had but just fitted himself for a worthier task, that he was just ready to begin the work to which he was called.