Charles Hare Hemphill, 'The Irish Serjeant'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') presents Charles Hare Hemphill KC — Irish barrister, Liberal MP for North Tyrone, later 1st Baron Hemphill — as a rotund, self-satisfied figure in a dark frock coat, pince-nez dangling from his nose, watch-chain straining across a generous belly. The caption 'The Irish Serjeant' nods to his rank as Serjeant-at-Law and his prominent Irish bar career. Ward's caricature leans on a stock comic type for Irish professional men of the period: the jovially corpulent, slightly pompous notable, rendered with affectionate condescension rather than sharp political malice. Hemphill, a Gladstonian Home Ruler, was notable enough by 1904 to warrant full-page treatment — Vanity Fair's reliable signal that a man had arrived, whatever the accompanying grin implied.