Lord Gerald FitzGerald, 'A Wandering Minstrel'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') presents Lord Gerald FitzGerald (1821–1886), younger son of the third Duke of Leinster, seated on a plain wooden chair with a cello between his knees, bow held loosely in his right hand. The caption — 'A Wandering Minstrel' — doubles as a gentle social joke: FitzGerald was president of the Wandering Minstrels amateur orchestral society, a performer with the Windsor Strollers, and a member of La Società Lirica. Ward renders him as a stout, white-haired gentleman of sixty-odd, wire spectacles perched low, grey beard spreading wide — the caricature exaggerating his settled, prosperous bulk against the instrument's elegant curves. The political edge is mild: an aristocrat who might have wielded influence instead devoted himself, publicly and cheerfully, to amateur music-making.