William Hamilton Gibson (October 5, 1850 – July 16, 1896) was an American illustrator, author and naturalist.

Gibson was born in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, of an old, distinguished New England family; one of his great-great-grandfathers was the jurist Richard Dana (1699–1772), who was the great-grandfather of the famous author Richard Henry Dana Jr.[1][2] The financial failure and in 1868 the death of Gibson's father, a New York broker, put an end to his studies in the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and made it necessary for him to earn his own living.

From the life insurance business, in Brooklyn, he soon turned to the study of natural history and illustration, he had sketched flowers and insects when he was only eight years old, had long been interested in botany and entomology, and had acquired great skill in making faux flowers.

[2] He died of apoplexy, brought on by overwork at Washington, Connecticut, where he had had a summer studio, and where in a great boulder is inset a relief portrait of him by H. K.

[3] Gibson illustrated S. A. Drake's In the Heart of the White Mountains, C. D. Warner's New South, and E. P. Roe's Nature's Serial Story; and his own books, The Complete American Trapper (1876; revised, 1880, as Camp Life in the Woods); Pastoral Days: or, Memories of a New England Year (1880); Highways and Byways (1882); Happy Hunting Grounds (1886); Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine (1890); Sharp Eyes: a Rambler's Calendar (1891); Our Edible Mushrooms and Toadstools (1895); Eye Spy: Afield with Nature among Flowers and Animate Things (1897); and My Studio Neighbours (1898).