Carlo Pellegrini — 'Diplomacy' (Lord Lyons), 1878

Signed Ape — Carlo Pellegrini's pseudonym — this chromolithograph caricatures Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, 2nd Baron Lyons, Britain's Ambassador to France and one of the era's most respected diplomatists. The plate caption reads simply "Diplomacy", Vanity Fair's customary one-word editorial verdict. Pellegrini renders Lyons as a stout, ruddy-faced man of late middle age, top-hatted and double-breasted in funereal grey, one gloved hand pocketed — the very image of patrician immobility. The silhouette exaggerates his girth; the face carries a wary, compressed expression that reads as shrewdness withheld. The composition argues that effective diplomacy is less eloquence than mass: this man does not move; events arrange themselves around him.