"A Symphony" — Vanity Fair, 12 January 1878

Signed 'Spy' in the lower right, this chromolithograph from Vanity Fair's celebrated 'Men of the Day' series caricatures its subject in a long tobacco-brown frock coat, black beret, and monocle, holding a slender mahl-stick or painter's implement. The caption beneath reads 'a symphony' — a wry nod to the Whistlerian aesthetic then scandalizing London. The figure's curling mustache, exaggerated aquiline nose, and dandyish posture are rendered with the elastic line-work Ward perfected. The caricature carries the era's habitual sharpening of 'foreign' facial features to signal artistic eccentricity and outsider status, a convention Vanity Fair applied freely to anyone who unsettled English propriety. Politically, the plate arrives at the height of the Ruskin–Whistler libel trial, positioning its subject as a provocateur whose very title is a joke at the expense of painting that dared call itself music.