Colman O'Loghlen, 'An Irish Baronet' — Vanity Fair, 28 September 1872

Adriano Cecioni's chromolithograph — one of his rare contributions to Vanity Fair's 'Statesmen' series (No. 125) — portrays Colman Michael O'Loghlen, 2nd Baronet and Irish Liberal MP, in profile, hunched forward in a dark frock coat, hands loose at his sides. The caption 'An Irish Baronet' is arch: O'Loghlen sat for County Clare and was a vocal Catholic voice at Westminster, and the label reduces a barrister-politician to ethnic type. Cecioni, an Italian sculptor by training, renders the face with an enlarged nose and prognathous jaw — physiognomic conventions applied freely to Irish subjects in this period, when pseudo-scientific race theory routinely mapped political otherness onto facial structure. The figure is nonetheless individuated and not brutal; the mockery is social as much as ethnic.