Tom Loates

Signed Spy (Leslie Ward), this chromolithograph plate from Vanity Fair presents champion flat-racing jockey Tom Loates in full-length frontal pose, hands planted on hips, riding crop tucked in his right hand. He wears the standard jockey's kit—olive hacking jacket, white breeches, tan-topped black boots, and a vivid red cap and cravat. Ward's characteristic caricature inflates the head relative to the slight body, a device used uniformly across the series to gently mock the subject's physical type rather than ethnicity. The composition flatters Loates's compact, purposeful stance, reflecting Vanity Fair's broadly admiring tone toward sporting celebrities of the turf, whose working-class origins the magazine politely elided in favor of celebrating their results on the track.