Sir George Biddell Airy ('Astronomy')

Ape (Carlo Pellegrini) renders the Astronomer Royal as a stooped, elderly figure in black frock coat and top hat, leaning heavily on a walking cane — a silhouette of authority in physical decline. The caption reads simply 'Astronomy', Vanity Fair's characteristic habit of labelling great men by their field rather than their name. Airy, who held the Greenwich post for 46 years and famously bungled the search for Neptune, is treated without malice but without flattery: the hunched posture and exaggerated beak nose are classic Pellegrini economy, reducing a Victorian institution to a single expressive curve. No ethnic caricature is present. The plate is a fond, slightly mordant valediction to a career already past its zenith.