Tom Loates

Signed *Spy* (Leslie Ward), this chromolithograph plate from *Vanity Fair* presents champion flat-racing jockey Tom Loates in full-length frontal pose, hands planted on hips, riding crop tucked in his right hand. He wears the standard jockey's kit—olive hacking jacket, white breeches, tan-topped black boots, and a vivid red cap and cravat. Ward's characteristic caricature inflates the head relative to the slight body, a device used uniformly across the series to gently mock the subject's physical type rather than ethnicity. The composition flatters Loates's compact, purposeful stance, reflecting *Vanity Fair*'s broadly admiring tone toward sporting celebrities of the turf, whose working-class origins the magazine politely elided in favor of celebrating their results on the track.