Sam Loates

Ward's plate presents champion jockey Sam Loates in a side-profile caricature — the characteristic Spy pose that reduces a man to his most legible silhouette. Loates stands in a long tan overcoat, black riding boots, and a peaked leather jockey's cap, a long whip carried loosely behind his back. The exaggeration concentrates on his jutting chin and heavy-lidded, downcast expression, giving him a brooding, almost sullen gravity unusual for a sporting subject. The caption reads simply Sam Loates beneath the image, with the printer's credit to Vincent Brooks Day & Son. No overt political argument is present; the plate belongs to Vanity Fair's sustained celebration of the Turf, treating jockeys as celebrities worthy of the same chromolithographic treatment given to Cabinet ministers and judges.