John Francis Maguire, 'A Home Ruler' — Statesmen No. 109

Adriano Cecioni's plate shows Maguire — Irish MP, journalist, and ardent advocate of Home Rule — as a stooped, side-profile figure in black frock coat and stovepipe hat, monocle catching the light, hands clasped behind his back. The caption 'A Home Ruler' is both label and mild jeer: Maguire had championed Isaac Butt's Home Government Association in Westminster, and the title marks him as a political category as much as a man. The nose is grotesquely elongated, the jaw prognathous — exaggerations typical of political caricature in Punch and the illustrated press of the period. The caricature is cruder than Pellegrini's usual wit, reflecting broader anxieties in British liberal opinion about Irish legislative demands in 1872.