His letters are equally full of the nature-subjects he is treating and of the ways in which he is treating them. But there is no question of the strong, irrepressible need of his spirit which drove him to self-expression by pencil and brush. “I am fairly crazy to get to painting,” he said to a friend at the beginning of the last summer of his life. “My lecture course and other business matters have kept me from using my brush lately, and I long to get my colors and go to work.” That was a remark which reveals his whole life, his constant mood. Not only was he always anxious to be at work, but he wanted to be at work with his colors. This urgency drove him to art as a profession. It lightened all his busy years. It ranked him by divine right among the best of American artists. He was a thorough artist in his love of the technical side of his work. He delighted in mastery of the materials of art. He liked the problems growing out of them. He knew the tools of his craft, and never was hampered by any uncertainty as to what he could do with the means at his command. His use of pencil and brush began early, and he soon knew the possibilities of black and white and water-colors. He was quick to learn the special art of drawing upon wood, for the engraver. He had no fastidious scruples against the camera, but was swift to resort to it and learn its possibilities and make it into a tool to shape his thought. When he turned to color as a medium of expression, he did so with all the [Illustration: _Pen-and-Ink Sketch_ _From a Letter_] enthusiam of a true believer in its power, and a purpose to get at all its resources. Although so much of his early work was translated to the world by the wood-engraver, yet when wood-engraving began to decline, and the publishers took to process-work, and the “half-tone” crowded out the fine, laborious work of the burin, Gibson was not in the least dismayed. He wasted no time or sentiment in mourning the decadent methods, but sought at once to learn the utmost what the new methods would yield to a determined and artistic mind. How successful he was is well shown in that beautiful volume which won such instant favor with his later constituency, “Sharp Eyes.” Its delicate half-tones vie with the wood-engraving in expressiveness, in delicacy, and in poetic feeling; and they are a standing testimony to the artist’s versatility and technical energy. He was never at a loss for a means of expression. The rudest tools were converted to delicate and sufficient implements in his fingers. There are letters from him describing some illustration of his or some painting, in which the pen and ink with which he wrote were made to sketch his work so vividly that one is tempted to rate the _tour-de-force_ of the written page as fine a show of power as the picture it illustrated.