Whitelaw Reid

Leslie Ward draws Whitelaw Reid—Ohio-born editor of the New York Tribune and U.S. Ambassador to Britain—in three-quarter profile, frock-coated and silver-haired, holding a pince-nez and a sheet of copy as though mid-editorial conference. The caption 'New York Tribune' anchors him to the paper he had run since Horace Greeley's death in 1872, transforming it into a Republican organ of record. Ward's caricature is respectful rather than savage: the silhouette is slightly elongated, the white goatee and patrician bearing gently exaggerated. The portrait registers Reid's dual standing—press baron and diplomat—at the moment he was cementing Anglo-American relations during Edward VII's coronation year.