Thomas Shaughnessy ('The Canadian Pacific')

Leslie Ward ('Spy') depicts Sir Thomas George Shaughnessy — Irish-born president of the Canadian Pacific Railway — as a prosperous Edwardian grandee in frock coat and pinstripe trousers, a lit pipe held casually at the chest and a white pocket-square adding patrician finish. The caption 'The Canadian Pacific' reduces the man to his corporate empire, a wry Vanity Fair habit of crowning businessmen with their enterprises rather than their names. Ward's caricature is relatively gentle: the sandy moustache is exaggerated, the head slightly enlarged, but there is none of the ethnic grotesquerie sometimes visited on Irish-born subjects in this period. The composition conveys confident institutional power — exactly the image a railway baron consolidating transcontinental monopoly would wish the magazine's clubland readership to carry away.