George Ward Hunt, 'The fat of the land'

Signed Ape (Carlo Pellegrini), this chromolithograph caricatures George Ward Hunt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, seated sideways in a leather club chair, hands folded across a notably ample belly. He wears a tall silk hat, dark frock coat, and grey beard — the very uniform of Victorian respectability. Pellegrini's joke is literal and pointed: Hunt was famously corpulent, and the caption 'The fat of the land' translates his physical excess directly into political metaphor, implying a Treasury man who feeds well while managing public money. The profile pose — Ape's preferred angle — lets the silhouette do the satirical work, the stomach's curve rhyming with the subject's comfortable Tory complacency. No ethnic caricature is present.