'Little Menlo': Colonel George E. Gouraud

Pellegrini renders Colonel George Gouraud—Thomas Edison's London agent and the man who introduced the phonograph to Britain—as a stocky, self-satisfied figure in a dark frock coat, hands thrust in pockets, crowned by an outsized cream top hat that dwarfs his ruddy, mustachioed face. The hat is the joke: it inflates his ego visually even as the caption 'Little Menlo' deflates his stature, subordinating him to Edison's New Jersey laboratory while gently mocking his borrowed celebrity. The caricature carries no ethnic distortion; the humor is purely social—the promoter puffed up on reflected genius, dressed for a gentleman's club rather than an inventor's workshop. Signed 'Ape' in the lower left corner.