Ira D. Sankey — 'Praise and Prayer'

Carlo Pellegrini's chromolithograph presents the American evangelist Ira D. Sankey — Dwight L. Moody's celebrated singing partner — mid-phrase, head tilted upward as though mid-hymn, a sheet of music or scripture held at chest level. The caption, Praise and Prayer, neatly encapsulates Sankey's public role: he was the melodic engine of the Moody-Sankey revival crusades that electrified British audiences in 1873–75. Pellegrini exaggerates his broad, fleshy nose and ruddy complexion in the studio's habitual manner. The Vanity Fair editors clearly regarded the American revivalists as legitimate cultural phenomena, worth placing among politicians and peers as genuine shapers of Victorian opinion.