William Hamilton Gibson (American, 1850 - 1896)
 
This rare 19th century Tonalist landscape watercolor by Connecticut artist and American naturalist William Hamilton Gibson of a man walking through a meadow measures 9”x15” or in the gesso gold frame dimensions of 17”x 23” and is signed and dated lower right, W. Hamilton Gibson 1891.  The painting is in wonderful condition with no defects and was expertly matted and reframed in 2009.  William Hamilton Gibson was a highly regarded American Naturalist and artist. Given Gibson’s untimely premature death at the age of 46, the quantity artworks are limited in number and rarely appear on the open market, as most of his paintings are closely held in private collections.
 
Biography:
William Hamilton Gibson has been called one of the three most influential naturalists of the 19th Century, and an accomplished writer and artist. Born in the hamlet of Newtown, western Connecticut, the son of New York broker Edmund T.H. Gibson and Elizabeth Charlotte Syanford, he attended the 'Gunnery' Preparatory Academy at Washington, Conn. at the age of ten, and later entered the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.
His father's death in 1868, combined with the post-Civil War recession, forced Gibson to give up his studies and earn his way in the world. Initially, he went into the insurance business, but abandoned it in under a year. He then worked as a lithographer for Appleton's in New York, quickly moving into sketching for that firm as well as for others.
 
Drawn to the natural world and a gifted illustrator, he was soon doing work for major magazines, including 'Harper's Monthly.' He also became a popular lecturer on natural history.
 
While he lived and worked in Brooklyn, he kept a summer studio at Washington, Conn. His delightful book, "My Studio Neighbors," is about the wildlife that surrounded him at his country studio. While filled with illustrations, his words are what bring Nature herself alive for the reader.
 
In addition to his magazine work, his published books include Pastoral Days, Highways and Byways, Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine, and Our Native Orchids.  In the spring of 1873, he made a trip to Washington, DC, making sketches for "Picturesque America", an  early day "coffee-table" style book. In 1876 he published a book for boys, "The Complete American Trapper or the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making."
 
His illustrations for an article by Mrs. Helen S. Conant ("Birds and Their Plumage", Harper's Magazine, August 1878) attracted critical acclaim, and lead to continuous artistic success. There followed articles for "Harper's" and other monthlies, and an extensive series of handsomely illustrated books expressing a love of nature and a nostalgia for the countryside of his native Connecticut. Along with Thoreau and Burroughs, he came to be regarded as one of the three most influential nature writers of the time, stimulating an appreciation of the native wildlife (particularly insects) and flora (from fungi to orchids). He enjoyed alerting his readers to overlooked wonders of nature close at hand.
 
He married Emma Ludlow Blanchard on October 31, 1878 at the Clinton Avenue Congregational Church in Brooklyn, by the Rev. Henry W. Beecher. They had two sons, William Hamilton, Jr. and Dana Blanchard.
 
Gibson was best known to the public for his pen-and-ink sketches, remarkable for their detail and biological accuracy, published in magazines and in his books as wood and steel engravings. Few among his admiring public were aware that his interests extended also to painting as well.  He was an early and active member of the Watercolor Society, and favored watercolor and gouache over oils. Because of the limitations of color-printing technology in his day, few of his color paintings were ever reproduced in publication.
 
In addition to his artistic and literary accomplishments, Gibson was in demand as a speaker, and lectured on the structure of orchids and their pollination by insects, using ingenious models of his own contrivance.
 
In 1896, at his home in Washington, Connecticut, Gibson died of a stroke, which his friends believed to have been brought on by overwork. Whatever the validity of their opinion on medical grounds, it was surely an accurate description of Gibson's habit of enthusiastic, continuous, and very productive labor. Only a few years after his death, a rather exhaustive biography was published by John Coleman Adams (1901). It is possible that Adams's book was seen as definitive enough that it discouraged later writers, and it may, somewhat ironically, have led to the undeserved neglect of Gibson's work for over a century.