'The Derby-Day' — Mr William P. Frith

Spy (Leslie Ward) caricatures the Royal Academician William Powell Frith, celebrated painter of crowded Victorian genre scenes, most famously Derby Day (1858). The plate, captioned "The Derby-Day" and numbered 236 in the Men of the Day series, shows Frith at his easel — a stout, white-haired figure with exaggerated jowls and a mop of wild hair, clutching a loaded palette and a fistful of brushes while a long mahlstick angles across the composition. The caricature is affectionate rather than hostile: the physical inflation of head and torso against spindly legs is standard Spy technique, mocking celebrity without malice. Ward catches Frith at the height of his fame, a painter whose populist spectacles the Academy simultaneously celebrated and condescended to.