William Black

Leslie Ward ('Spy') renders the Scottish novelist William Black (1841–1898) as a broad-shouldered, large-headed figure in a tan Norfolk jacket, black trousers, and stout boots — the costume of an outdoorsman rather than a man of letters. He grips a tall fly-fishing rod in one hand and what appears to be a fly-book in the other, referencing the passionate angling that filled Black's leisure hours and coloured his Highland fiction. The caricature exaggerates his reddish moustache, wired spectacles, and ruddy complexion. Ward's technique here is social in nature, gently ribbing a popular author whose romantic novels of Scottish scenery (A Princess of Thule, Macleod of Dare) had made him a Victorian household name by the 1880s.