"King Cole" — Sir Henry Cole, Men of the Day No. 29

The plate caricatures Sir Henry Cole — founding director of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and organising force behind the Great Exhibition of 1851 — under the nursery-rhyme sobriquet "King Cole." The chromolithograph, No. 146 in the series, exaggerates Cole's considerable girth and wild white hair into a figure of rotund self-satisfaction: hands thrust into the pockets of loud checked trousers, a long dark frock coat hanging open, chin tilted upward with an air of proprietorial complacency. A small shaggy dog rears on its hind legs behind him — a stock comic accessory suggesting the great man's domestic vanity. The caricature is genial rather than hostile; Cole was popular enough that mockery of his bureaucratic empire-building reads as fond ribbing of a public institution made flesh.