Henry Campbell-Bannerman — 'The Opposition'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') presents the Liberal leader in profile, seated heavily on a tufted leather bench, legs crossed, hands folded in the lap — the very picture of patient, immovable opposition. The caption 'The Opposition' is both label and taunt: Campbell-Bannerman had led the Liberals through years of Tory dominance and was then bracing for the coming storm of the Boer War, which would split his party over the question of 'methods of barbarism.' Ward's caricature exaggerates the subject's broad frame and white-haired solidity, but forgoes ethnic distortion — this is a portrait of political temperament, rendering a Scottish Radical grandee as stolid, watchful, and stubbornly unhurried, waiting his turn on the government benches he would finally claim in 1905.