Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, Bt MP — 'The King of Wales'

Signed 'Spy' (Leslie Ward), this chromolithograph — Statesmen No. 146 — caricatures Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, the immensely wealthy Denbighshire baronet and Tory MP whose family had dominated north Welsh politics for generations. Ward inflates his subject's ruddy, jowly face and voluminous sandy mutton-chop whiskers to comic proportion, perching a tall silk hat atop the whole edifice. The caption 'The King of Wales' is the joke's entire point: Williams-Wynn wielded quasi-feudal patronage across the Welsh marches, styling himself a national figurehead in a country that technically had no king. The caricature's bloat and florid complexion suggest comfortable excess — landed privilege made flesh. Its politics are those of Gladstonian Liberal satire aimed at unreformed Tory squirearchy.