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Finley Peter Dunne ('Mr Dooley') by Leslie Ward
Public domain · digitally restored by ComicBooks.com
Men of the Day: The Vanity Fair Caricatures

Finley Peter Dunne ('Mr Dooley')

Leslie Ward · Vanity Fair supplement, 27 July 1905. Chromolithograph by Leslie Ward ('Spy').

Ward's full-length caricature shows a trim, bespectacled man in a dark checked suit, one hand pocketed, the other holding a lit cigarette with studied nonchalance. The caption reads simply 'Mr Dooley' — the fictional Irish-American saloonkeeper whose dialect columns made Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) a transatlantic celebrity. The portrait is notably genteel: no stage-Irish exaggeration, no grotesque ethnic coding of the kind Vanity Fair sometimes visited on Irish subjects in earlier decades. By 1905 Dunne was a guest of presidents and London editors alike, and Ward renders him accordingly — a man of letters in good English tailoring, whose Irishness is carried entirely by the fictional pseudonym beneath him rather than by any physiognomic distortion.

About this artifact

Creator
Leslie Ward
Date
Vanity Fair supplement, 27 July 1905. Chromolithograph by Leslie Ward ('Spy').
Rights
Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
Restoration
Digitally restored and hosted by ComicBooks.com.

Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.