Ira David Sankey ('Mr. J. D. Sankey')

The plate labels its subject Mr. J. D. Sankey and is signed Ape — Carlo Pellegrini's habitual pseudonym. Sankey appears from the chest up behind a pale stone pulpit, mouth open mid-song or mid-sermon, wearing a dark frock coat and white bow tie. Pellegrini gives him a bulbous, reddened nose and a neatly trimmed beard — caricature conventions of the period that exaggerate without explicit ethnic targeting, aimed instead at the American revivalist's well-publicized bluster. Sankey had toured Britain with evangelist Dwight Moody in 1873–75, drawing enormous crowds and considerable satirical attention from a press amused that gospel hymn-singing had become a mass-entertainment phenomenon. The pulpit setting makes the joke precise: celebrity religion as theatrical performance.