The Mystery of the Misplacement of William Hamilton Gibson's Mycological Watercolors

William Hamilton Gibson

Gibson was one of nine children and grew up amid the pastoral beauty of Litchfield County, Connecticut. As a boy he sketched flowers and insects, and an early interest in botany and entomology followed. He studied art at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in New York. When his father died in 1868, he went to work at the Home Life Insurance Company for a steady income, but office work was not his calling. He returned to art and devoted his life to the study of nature, depicting its beauty in both word and illustration. Largely self-taught as an artist, writer, and naturalist, he came to be known as one of America’s foremost nineteenth-century nature artists and writers.

Gibson became an expert illustrator for many periodicals. His most popular illustrations accompanied nature articles in Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s Monthly, and Century, and their near-photographic, almost microscopic accuracy of detail reflects how well he knew his subjects. His artwork, mostly landscapes, includes watercolors, monochrome washes, and graphite drawings. It is held in private collections and in institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, and the Highlands Biological Station.

Gibson married Emma L. Blanchard (1851–1930), and they had two sons, William Hamilton (1883–1956) and Dana Blanchard (1888–1911). He died of a stroke in Washington, Connecticut, at only forty-six, a year after Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms was published.

Gibson’s Watercolor Plates

For the book, Harper & Brothers turned Gibson’s thirty watercolors into chromolithographic plates and reproduced fifty-seven other pen-and-ink illustrations. Once a publisher had its plates made, it was common practice to return the original art to the illustrator. Today, six of the original watercolors are held in the Reinke Archives of the Highlands Biological Station in Highlands, North Carolina. Another six, along with two of the book’s black-and-white illustrations, are in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden.

Look closer at the original for Plate XXIII and you will find two marks the printed plate leaves out: Gibson’s monogram in the lower left, and a penciled copyright line in the lower right.

How Did Gibson’s Watercolors Come to Columbia?

A paper attached to the back of two of the HBS watercolors begins to explain how Columbia acquired them in the first place. It reads:

The gift came the year after Gibson’s death. To understand it, it helps to know a little about President Low and about botany at Columbia in the 1890s.

Seth Low

Seth Low (1850–1916) was an American municipal reformer, university builder, and philanthropist. As president of Columbia College from 1890 to 1901 (it was renamed Columbia University in 1896), he transformed a small college on a crowded city block into a large university with an impressive new campus on Morningside Heights. Low inherited an institution in the middle of a contentious identity crisis and moved quickly to settle it in favor of research and graduate education. He brought the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Barnard College, Teachers College, and other affiliates more closely into the university and reorganized the Law School. His restructuring of the faculties added a School of Pure Science in 1892, giving the natural sciences, botany among them, an institutional home of their own. His philanthropy included one million dollars for the Low Memorial Library on the new campus, given in 1895. In 1901 Low was elected the second mayor of the consolidated City of New York, and he left Columbia to take office in 1902.

Botany at Columbia: Britton and Underwood

Columbia was rapidly expanding its science departments under Low. Its botany program, led by Nathaniel Lord Britton, was busy building teaching collections: herbaria, reference libraries, and microscope collections. In 1892, the same year the School of Pure Science was created, Britton and his wife Elizabeth were driving the founding of the New York Botanical Garden, and the Garden soon became deeply intertwined with how botany was taught at Columbia. In 1895 Britton left Columbia to become the Garden’s first director. He brought much of Columbia’s herbarium and botanical library with him, and those collections became a founding resource for what is now one of the world’s premier collections of botanical literature and art.

Britton’s departure left the botany department to a new leader. Lucien M. Underwood (1853–1907) became professor of botany and mycology at Columbia in 1896, the year Gibson died, and later joined the staff of the New York Botanical Garden in 1907. The Department of Botany that received the Gibson gift in 1897 was therefore Underwood’s. Underwood had earlier founded the herbarium at DePauw University in 1891, teaching students the structural mysteries of plants and fungi.

Gibson was known to many at Columbia and the Garden, and Underwood was among them. In historical reviews of American botanical science, Underwood’s texts and Gibson’s popular articles are often credited together with demystifying the world of fungi for the everyday citizen. They transformed what had been feared as dangerous “toadstools” into a respected, mainstream hobby of nature exploration.

In a review of recent publications in the first volume of the journal Torreya (Vol. 1, 1901, pp. 43–46), Underwood described the public interest in mushrooms and Gibson’s part in it:

The Columbia Gibson Works at the New York Botanical Garden

The Botanical Art Collection in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, one of the world’s premier collections of botanical literature, holds ten Gibson works that appear in Columbia’s accession records. Catalogued as Art 0117:1–10, they are six watercolor plates, black-and-white illustrations, and one item catalogued only as “Mushrooms,” whose medium is undetermined. The record gives no date for when the items were given or catalogued, so how and when they moved from Columbia to the Garden is still unknown.

Perhaps Gibson’s vivid, detailed watercolors found a second life at Columbia as teaching aids, tacked up as instructional wall illustrations rather than filed away as fine art. That might explain how some of them ended up forgotten in a storeroom decades later.