Thomas Nast, by John White Alexander, 1887

This is not a Nast cartoon but a formal portrait of the man himself, painted the year his influence at Harper's Weekly was waning. John White Alexander renders Nast at roughly fifty: dark beard streaked with grey, a red boutonnière at his lapel, one hand resting on a walking stick. The pose is patrician — the costume of a gentleman, not a scrapper. Yet the sitter made his name as America's most combative pictorial journalist, whose caricatures of Boss Tweed's Tammany ring were so damaging that Tweed reportedly offered him half a million dollars to stop. Nast refused. Alexander's brushwork flatters; the cartoons did not.