In Diplomatic Circles — Mr. Tagg at Washington Society

Gibson draws a crowded Washington reception in confident pen-and-ink cross-hatching. Fashionably gowned women — the recognizable Gibson Girl silhouette, high-piled hair, long trained skirts — circulate among men in white-tie evening dress, one figure identifiable as the social climber Mr. Tagg. A Chinese diplomat in mandarin cap appears at center; his rendering carries the flattened, exotic shorthand Gibson's era routinely applied to Asian figures, treating difference as visual punchline rather than portraiture. The joke is Tagg's fantasy of parlaying a Washington party into a posting at the Court of St. James — ambition mistaking glitter for substance. Gibson's satire runs equally at the women who perform glamour and the men who mistake proximity to power for possession of it.