'Polly' — Lieutenant-General Reginald Pole-Carew

Ward renders Pole-Carew in three-quarter profile, erect and self-satisfied in dark dress uniform with gold epaulettes, medal ribbons, a striped sash, and red trouser-stripes — the full plumage of a senior officer fresh from the South African War. He holds a cane in one white-gloved hand; an unsheathed cavalry sabre trails from the other, its tip resting on the ground. The nickname 'Polly' gently punctures the martial gravity, hinting at a social lightness behind the brass. The caricature exaggerates a long nose and prominent moustache without ethnic distortion — Ward's mild, clubbable mode rather than Pellegrini's sharper knife. Pole-Carew would later trade khaki for the Liberal Unionist benches at Westminster, a trajectory this portrait, all uniform and very little irony, perhaps inadvertently predicts.