Lord Westbury (Richard Bethell), Statesmen No. 15

Carlo Pellegrini's chromolithograph presents Lord Westbury — Lord Chancellor under Palmerston and architect of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act — as a rotund, white-haired figure clutching a paper, his oversized head dominating a shrunken body in the manner Pellegrini ('Ape') made his signature. A black top hat rests on the salmon-coloured ottoman behind him, a courtroom prop displaced. The caption, 'An eminent Christian man,' bites hard: Westbury had resigned the Chancellorship in 1865 under parliamentary censure for nepotism, his reputation for arrogant irreligion being notorious. The ironic caption mocks both his detractors' pious language and his own contempt for it. The caricature carries no ethnic distortion beyond the standard bulbous-head convention Pellegrini applied across his English subjects.