Carving out a Mark: George du Maurier, Charles Dana Gibson and the Site of Whiteness in Illustration

Jennifer A. Greenhill

This paper looks first to the illustrative tradition in England during the late nineteenth century, specifically the work of George du Maurier, to reflect on illustration in the hands of the American artist, Charles Dana Gibson. I begin by exploring du Maurier’s series of illustrations, “The Browns,” produced for publication in Punch in the 1880s. As a means of illuminating the night sky that serves as a backdrop for their leisure pursuits, the Browns coat their bodies in “luminous paint,” as du Maurier’s captions put it, making them into spectral presences possessed of otherworldly brightness. The way the Browns make brightness material, by making their own bodies into light, speaks evocatively to du Maurier’s condition of partial blindness and his urgent need to illuminate the dark, and his subjects, in order to make his work. But this intensification of lightness, which emits from the illustrated page a bright white glow in “The Browns” series may also help us to understand the peculiar place of whiteness in the medium of illustration.

I use this premise to explore whiteness as a naturalized category that can only be known through an epistemological manipulation, which wrenches it out of the realm of the “natural” and into the space of the unfamiliar. Du Maurier’s series makes this process explicit by suggesting that whiteness becomes visible only when it is made to seem strange, when its “lightness” is made into a tangible property. But whiteness, of course, is also the condition of the blank page; the thing that stands between the late-nineteenth-century illustrator and his mark; the space that the illustrator carves out, divides, and obliterates with his black outlines and hatching.

What does whiteness as a condition of identity have to do with whiteness as a constituent element of illustrative process in the work of du Maurier and Gibson? What can the fraught significance of whiteness in illustration help us to understand about the peculiar ways in which identity is formulated in the medium at this time? How does the word of a caption, text, or signature carve out whiteness differently from the illustration it purports to explain? Using du Maurier’s work as a springboard, I explore these questions in the art of Charles Dana Gibson and in the context of late-nineteenth-century America. That these illustrators were engaged in analogous projects across the Atlantic—to codify upper-middle-class (and implicitly white) types, to mock their pretensions and laugh at their failures—signals the potential rewards of bringing them together in an exploration of the politics of race in illustration at this moment.