Alexander Beresford Hope — 'Batavian Grace'

Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') renders the Conservative MP and aesthete Alexander Beresford Hope as a rotund, bearish figure in a dark frock coat, his considerable girth exaggerated in profile, pince-nez perched on his nose, a silk top hat dangling behind his back. The caption, 'Batavian Grace,' is a wry cut: Hope's Dutch-descended Beresford family line is invoked to mock his self-appointed role as arbiter of High Church taste and Gothic Revival architecture. A founding patron of the Saturday Review and champion of Tractarian aesthetics, Hope was a parliamentary obstructionist on Irish Church disestablishment. Pellegrini's caricature, signed lower-left, satirises pomposity through sheer bulk — gravitas literally embodied, and gently ridiculed.