Lord Granville (Granville Leveson-Gower), 2nd Earl Granville

Pellegrini's chromolithograph — sixth in the magazine's celebrated Statesmen series — shows Lord Granville, Foreign Secretary and Liberal Party fixer, leaning against a low garden wall with hands lightly clasped, his oversized head and puffed curls exaggerating an air of comfortable self-satisfaction. The caption beneath identifies his political gift precisely: not oratory but management — 'the ablest professor in the cabinet of the tact by which power is kept.' Gladstone's indispensable conciliator, Granville was famous for smoothing crises others inflamed. Pellegrini captures that reputation physically: the soft, rounded form signals amiability rather than force, a man whose weapon was the drawing-room, not the dispatch box. The copper coronet in the upper right corner signals his peerage without irony.