"A Symphony" — Vanity Fair, 12 January 1878

Signed by Spy (Leslie Ward), this plate carries the caption "a symphony" beneath a full-length caricature of a lean, long-coated figure in a flat black cap, monocle, and drooping mustache — dandyish and self-regarding, holding a thin baton or maulstick at a fastidious angle. The exaggerated elongation and theatrical pose mock the subject's aesthetic self-presentation rather than ethnic features; the caricature's target is pretension, not origin. The caption's irony is pointed: symphony invokes both musical ambition and the Aesthetic Movement's doctrine of art-for-art's-sake, quietly ribbing a figure the magazine's largely conservative readership considered an insufferable poseur.