She was born Florence Evelyn Nesbit on December 25, 1884 in Tarentum, a small village near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was of Scots-Irish ancestry. As a child, Florence Evelyn was strikingly beautiful, but quiet and somewhat shy.[1] She had a younger brother, Howard.

The Nesbit family moved to Pittsburgh around 1893, when Evelyn was still a schoolgirl. Her father, a struggling lawyer named Winfield Scott Nesbit, died that year, leaving behind substantial debts; his wife and two children were nearly destitute. For years Evelyn and her mother and younger brother lived in near-poverty, but by the time she reached adolescence her startling beauty came to the attention of several local artists, including John Storm, and she was able to find employment as an artists' model.

Modeling career

1901 photograph by Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr.

In 1901, when Nesbit was sixteen, she and her mother moved into a tiny room at 249 W. 22nd Street in New York City. Her mother had difficulty in finding work and after several weeks, Evelyn persuaded her to let her model again. Using a letter of introduction from a Philadelphia artist, Evelyn met and posed for James Carroll Beckwith, who introduced her to other New York artists. Soon she began modeling for artists Frederick S. Church, Herbert Morgan, Gertrude Käsebier, Carl Blenner and photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr.

Eventually, Evelyn became one of the most in-demand artists' models in New York. She was seductively beautiful with long, wavy red hair and a slender, shapely figure. Charles Dana Gibson, one of the most popular artists in the country at the time, rendered a pen-and-ink profile of Evelyn with her red hair arranged in the form of a question mark. The work, titled "The Eternal Question"[1], remains one of Gibson's best known works and Evelyn entered the ranks of the famous turn-of-the-century "Gibson Girls."

Photographic fashion modeling, which was becoming more popular in daily newspapers, proved to be even more lucrative for Evelyn. Photographer Joel Feder would pay her $5 for a half-day shoot or $10 for a full day shoot (about $200 per day in 2006 dollars). Evelyn soon made more than enough money to support her family.