Joseph Rudyard Kipling, 'Soldiers Three'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') renders the thirty-eight-year-old Kipling as a compact, prosperous Victorian in a dark three-piece suit, pince-nez, and trim moustache, a thin cigarette held loosely in one raised hand. The caption, Soldiers Three, names his 1888 collection of stories set among British enlisted men in India — the book that made his reputation. The small decorative vignette of toy soldiers in the upper right corner underlines the literary reference. Kipling in 1894 was at his metropolitan peak, freshly returned from America and celebrated in London drawing rooms, so Vanity Fair presents him as a gentleman-of-letters.