George Faudel-Phillips, 'Mansion House'

Spy's full-length caricature of Sir George Faudel-Phillips (1840–1922), Lord Mayor of London 1896–97, appears under the caption Mansion House — the official residence his office commanded. Ward renders him in the standard gentlemanly armour of the age: black frock coat, top hat, dark gloves, and a walking cane held loosely behind his back. The exaggerated ruddy, broad-jowled face is Spy's habitual comic shorthand for civic self-satisfaction rather than ethnic commentary — Faudel-Phillips was Anglo-Jewish, and Vanity Fair had by this decade largely abandoned the cruder Hebrew caricatures common in the 1870s press. The plate ran as Men of the Day No. 683, acknowledging a City banker who rose to alderman and lord mayor through Tory patronage and commercial prominence.