Leslie Ward, 'She' — Henry Rider Haggard

Signed 'Spy' in the lower left, this chromolithograph depicts the novelist H. Rider Haggard in strict profile, rendered in Ward's characteristic full-length caricature style. Haggard wears a dark frock coat, olive-grey trousers, and polished black shoes; a gold monocle chain loops from his lapel. His features are sharply elongated — the prominent nose and jutting chin exaggerated, as Ward's method required — but without ethnic malice; this is the standard gentlemanly lampoon of a tall, angular Englishman. The caption, 'She', anchors the image to Haggard's 1887 sensation novel of the same name, then at the height of its fame. The plate flatters as much as it mocks: to appear in Vanity Fair was itself a mark of cultural arrival.