'The Squire' — Mr Henry Villebois

Pellegrini's plate shows a stout, ruddy-faced English gentleman in a dark frock coat, grey trousers, and bow-tie, hands tucked behind his back, turning his head with a faint air of self-satisfaction. The caption reads simply 'The Squire' — a social type as much as a name. Henry Villebois was a Norfolk landowner and racing man, a figure of the rural squirearchy whose authority rested on acreage and custom rather than office. Pellegrini exaggerates his florid complexion and heavy jowls, the standard vocabulary of genial mockery he applied to the English gentry: well-fed, well-pleased, and entirely untroubled. The caricature carries no ethnic animus — its gentle satire points instead at the comfortable insularity of Victorian landowning England.