'Trilby': George du Maurier

Spy (Leslie Ward) portrays the novelist and Punch cartoonist George du Maurier seated at a draughtsman's tilted drawing-board, legs crossed, spectacles low on his nose, glancing downward with an air of mild distraction. The caption reads simply 'Trilby'—the title of du Maurier's enormously successful 1894 novel, which had made him a celebrity late in life. The composition is characteristic of Ward's later work: relaxed, almost affectionate, with no grotesque distortion. Notably absent is any caricature of du Maurier's French-English heritage; Ward flatters rather than lampoons. The plate commemorates cultural triumph rather than political controversy—du Maurier as the gentleman-artist whose Bohemian Paris fiction had conquered London drawing rooms and Broadway simultaneously.