George Rowland Hill, 'Rugby Union'

Spy's chromolithograph of George Rowland Hill — then chairman of the Rugby Football Union — presents him in profile, a stocky figure in a brown tweed three-piece suit, bowler hat, and heavy laced boots, holding what appears to be a small card or ticket. The caricature exaggerates his solid, planted physicality: wide shoulders, thick legs, a set jaw — the visual argument being that Hill embodies the blunt, no-nonsense authority of rugby's governing body. The caption reads simply Rugby Union, placing institutional role above personality. As RFU chairman Hill would soon preside over the bitter amateur-versus-professional dispute that split the sport in 1895, making this portrait an unwitting document of English rugby's most turbulent decade.