'The United States' — General Robert Cumming Schenck

Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') renders the American diplomat and poker enthusiast Robert Cumming Schenck — then U.S. Minister to the Court of St. James's — as a thick-necked, ruddy-haired figure in a dark frock coat, shoulders hunched, hands thrust in pockets, head cocked in a self-satisfied smirk. The caption 'The United States' reduces the man to national type: blunt, self-important, unpolished among Mayfair's polish. Schenck was controversial in London for promoting a dubious Utah silver-mine scheme to British investors, and Pellegrini's caricature carries that whiff of bumptious American capitalism. The exaggerated jowls and squinting grin belong to the period's standard comic vocabulary for rendering New World vulgarity in Old World eyes.