George Frederick Samuel Robinson, Marquess of Ripon

Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') renders Robinson — then Viscount Goderich, later Marquess of Ripon — as a squat, forward-leaning figure in grey trousers, dark frock coat, and towering black top hat, his most distinctive feature an enormous auburn beard that overwhelms the small, shrewdly smiling face above it. A royal coronet floats in the upper right corner, advertising his aristocratic rank. The caricature's physical exaggeration lampoons a Liberal grandee known for earnest reformism and religious conversion (he became a Roman Catholic in 1874, scandalising Gladstone's circle). The composition is characteristic Pellegrini — silhouette-driven, lightly cruel, and entirely legible as a portrait of Whig-Liberal self-importance.