Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran, known in Arabic as Gibran Khalil Gibran, was born January 6, 1883, in Bsharri, Lebanon, which at the time was part of Syria and part of the Ottoman Empire. He was the youngest son of Khalil Sa’d Jubran, a tax collector eventually imprisoned for embezzlement, and Kamila Jubran, whose father was a clergyman in the Maronite Christian Church.

In 1885, Gibran emigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States, where they settled in the large Syrian and Lebanese community in Boston, Massachusetts. It was there that Gibran learned English and enrolled in art classes. His mother supported the family as a seamstress and by peddling linens.

At the age of 15, Gibran was sent by his mother to Beirut, Lebanon, to attend a Maronite school. He returned to Boston in 1902. In that year and the one that followed, Gibran’s sister, Sultana, half-brother, Bhutros, and mother died of tuberculosis and cancer, respectively. His remaining living sister, Marianna, supported herself and Gibran as a dressmaker.

In 1904, Gibran began publishing articles in an Arabic-language newspaper and also had the first public exhibit of his drawings, which were championed by the Boston photographer Fred Holland Day. Gibran modeled for Day, who was known for his photographs of boys and young men. It was through Day that Gibran’s artwork attracted the attention of a woman nine years his senior named Mary Haskell, who ran an all-girls school. 

Haskell became Gibran’s lifelong patron, paying for him to study art at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1908. There, Gibran met the sculptor August Rodin, who reportedly once called him “the William Blake of the twentieth century.” Gibran’s hundreds of drawings and paintings remain highly regarded.