Dunbar Plunket Barton, Q.C., M.P. — 'Mid Armagh'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') presents Dunbar Plunket Barton, Unionist M.P. for Mid Armagh and Queen's Counsel, in the chromolithograph series Statesmen, plate 692. Barton stands in three-quarter profile, rendered in a dark frock coat over striped trousers, a watch-chain looped at his waist — the uniform of a prosperous Victorian barrister-politician. The caption 'Mid Armagh' anchors him to his Ulster constituency at a moment when Irish Unionism was hardening against Home Rule. Ward's technique here is relatively sympathetic: the silhouette is lean and precise, the long nose slightly exaggerated but not grotesque. No ethnic caricature of the kind Ward sometimes employed with Irish Catholic subjects appears; Barton's Anglo-Irish Protestant respectability is instead affirmed through sartorial exactitude.