FROM THE ARCHIVES
William Hamilton Gibson This July marked the 125th anniversary of the death of William Hamilton Gibson (1850-1896), a renowned naturalist, painter, author, and alumnus, Class of 1866. We looked into the Paula and George Krimsky ’60 Archives and Special Collections to learn more about Gibson and how he viewed the natural world.
“Son of a New York financier with a summerhouse in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, ‘Willie’ Gibson distinguished himself early as an observer and painter of nature,” according to a biography by the late Paula Gibson Krimsky, longtime School Archivist and the artist’s great-granddaughter. Though self-taught, he was known for his meticulous depiction of the natural world. Gibson came to what was then The Gunnery in 1882, and according to a family story, Mr. Gunn “wrote to his father that he ‘sent Willie out into the woods to paint and excused him from Latin grammar because it is a talent at which he excels.’” In a letter to Gibson’s mother, dated 1864, Mr. Gunn wrote that her son was “always painting, drawing, when he should be studying, but meeting
William Hamilton Gibson, from the Paula and George Krimsky Archives and Special Collections all reproofs with that winsome smile.” “His interest in nature was strongly encouraged and developed through a series of botany classes he took while at the school, but he was left alone to pursue his enthusiasm in art; at the time Mr. Gunn offered no such art class, but undoubtedly encouraged Gibson’s interest,” Alyse Dufour ’07 wrote in her Gunn Scholar project, “A Place Called Home: The Pastoral in the Photography and Art Work of William Hamilton Gibson (1866) as Understood and Interpreted.” As part of her project, Dufour made prints from Gibson’s glass negatives, which were loaned to the archives by the Gibson family, “tracing their evolution into book illustrations and paintings,” and assembling an exhibition of his original work paired
An illustration of Mount Washington, from Fabyan House in the White Mountains, W.H. Gibson 44
The Frederick Gunn School Bulletin
Gibson and his wife, Emma Blanchard, had three children: Hamilton, who graduated from The Gunnery in 1902 and became the school’s third headmaster; Dana, who died in a hunting accident in 1911; and a daughter, Elizabeth, (not pictured) who later married Tertius van Dyke.
