ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Lost

Gibson, Charles Dana, 1867-1944, artist · 1906

Lost
Gibson sets this pen-and-ink scene in a bare schoolroom: a fashionably dressed woman in a long Victorian gown faces a formally suited man holding his hat across the room, while four young children cluster uncertainly between them. A world map hangs on the back wall—its hemispheres perhaps commenting on the scale of whatever has been misplaced. The title *Lost* almost certainly carries a domestic-comedy charge: a mother presenting her brood to a bachelor, or a wife confronting an estranged husband. Gibson's line work is characteristically clean and socially pointed, the children's postures conveying bewilderment that mirrors the adults' stiff, unresolved standoff. No ethnic caricature is visible; the humor is purely class-coded, aimed at the genteel readership that recognized itself in every pressed lapel and trained waist.

Gibson, Charles Dana, 1867-1944, artist Public domain