Thomas Nast, American Cartoonist

This formal portrait by noted New York photographer Pirie MacDonald shows Nast in his late sixties—thick white mustache upswept at the ends, full beard, dark suit jacket—the face of a man who spent four decades reshaping American political imagery. Nast's Harper's Weekly cartoons (1862–1886) weaponized caricature against Tammany Hall corruption, portraying Boss Tweed and his ring as bloated predators feeding on public money. His symbolic shorthand—the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, a jolly fur-trimmed Santa Claus—entered permanent American iconography. The photograph records no cartoon; it records the cartoonist himself, aging but composed, a year before President Roosevelt sent him to Ecuador as consul general, where he died of yellow fever.